The Age of the Empowered Buyer is Over. Are You Ready for What’s Next?
Demand Generation Programs Must Change to Reflect a New Buying Reality
By Bob Finlayson and Paul Brunato
Over the past few years we’ve seen a gradual but important shift in the behavior of buyers at B2B enterprises. The implications for demand generation programs are profound.
Simply put, if sellers of enterprise solutions want to grow revenue and take market share from competitors, they must realign their demand generation programs and redraw their customer journey maps. Here’s why.
Two key factors have emerged from evolving research into the behavior of buyers of complex, enterprise-grade solutions.
There is deep misalignment between how buyers of such solutions buy and how sellers sell
Buyers are overwhelmed with information and don’t know who to trust
The age of the “empowered buyer” began about a decade ago as digital platforms made access to - and publication of - information easy.
With easy access to vendor materials, buyers became self directed, gathering information on their own, with little vendor involvement.
Sellers, noticing this trend, began creating more and more content to serve up to buyers.
Today, digital channels are flooded with information. Not just from sellers, but from analysts, influencers and other buyers too.
Customers Are Increasingly Overwhelmed and Often Paralyzed
The result? “Customers are increasingly overwhelmed and often more paralyzed than empowered,” according to research conducted by Nick Toman, Brent Adamson and Cristina Gomez and published in Harvard Business Review.
Additionally, B2B buyers “don’t know what they’re looking for, where to get it, or whom to trust when they do find it,” according to the Content Marketing Institute, which conducts regular research into the behavior of marketers and buyers.
Here’s the rub. In spite of these challenges, commercial buyers still prefer to do their own research independently.
In fact, fully 77% of B2B buyers have completed more than half of the customer journey before they ever contact a vendor, according to research by Gartner.
Even more concerning for sellers of enterprise solutions, buyers of such solutions are spending less time interacting directly with sales representatives. Just 17% of their total buying time, according to Gartner.
As Brent Adamson points out in an excellent article on B2B sales, that number represents the total time interacting with sales team representatives. And, since buyers often aim to explore a minimum of three options in their research, each seller's sales reps will likely have as little as 5% or 6% of the buyer’s time, according to Adamson.
Even more startling, when broken down by generation, 44% of millennial buyers prefer to have no interaction with sales representatives, according to Gartner.
The Traditional Sales Model is Obsolete
The implication for marketers is clear: the traditional enterprise sales model – where marketing hands off leads to sales as soon as they are qualified – is increasingly obsolete. Marketers must take on more responsibility for moving the buyer through the customer journey, even through the purchase stage.
To address these evolving changes in buyer behavior, we recommend the following:
Realign your customer journey to build trust in the early stages of the journey and to automate and simplify – with digital tools – as much of the middle and late stages of the journey as possible.
Adjust your demand generation program, and the associated content, to this new sales process.
Redesign your sales process around the newly realigned customer journey.
Here’s how.
1. Realign Your Customer Journey
Build Trust During the Motivation and Awareness Stages
The beginning of the customer journey has two stages, Motivation and Awareness. We consider Motivation as the stage before the buyer realizes they are on a journey. They may not even know they have a challenge or an opportunity. Or they may have only a vague idea that they have a need.
Often, the buyer has been informed by management that business operations are to be changed, and the buyer begins to recognize that new tools or solutions are needed to accomplish the change.
The result is both passive and active information gathering. If sellers can establish trust with the buyer during these early stages of the journey, they will have a powerful competitive advantage as the buyer moves into the Consideration and Purchase stages of the journey.
During these early stages of the customer journey, trust is built not by selling, but by educating. Educate by creating content and touch points (events, webinars, etc.) that focus on the issues buyers face as a result of their business transition, challenge or opportunity.
Resist the temptation to incorporate details about your solution into such content. Attempting to sell the buyer at this early stage – when they have yet to realize they are on a journey and they are only trying to understand the new challenge or business imperative they face – will only create mistrust.
For buyers at this stage of the customer journey, you must become a resource. An unbiased educator that is providing fact-based analysis and information. This means sellers should incorporate outside experts into their early stage content and touch points. Such experts provide information not tied to the seller’s products and services, but related to the challenge the buyer is facing.
Automate the Consideration and Purchase Stages
As the buyer comes to understand and recognize the needs, challenges and opportunities wrapped up in the business issue they are facing, they typically begin seeking solutions. At this point, they enter the Consideration and Purchase stages of the customer journey.
Typically, as the buyer moves deeper into the Consideration and Purchase Stages of the customer journey, the sales team takes the lead.
In the Content Marketing Institute’s most recent survey, only 24% of marketers saw high value in content marketing targeting the Consideration Stage, and only 8% saw high value in marketing to the Purchase Stage. Clearly the vast majority of marketers are focused on the early stages of the customer journey.
This must change to meet the new buyer behavior. As Gartner explains in their Future of Enterprise Sales report, by 2025 we will see a “permanent transformation in (sales) strategy,” with a move to “hyperautomated, digital-first engagement with customers.” Increasingly, according to Gartner, B2B buyers – even of complex, enterprise-grade solutions – want less interaction with sales representatives.
This means marketers must develop new types of content to keep buyers engaged into and even through the consideration and purchase stages of the customer journey.
We know that buyers in the consideration stage are typically researching solutions, comparing options as they limit their field to those options they want to seriously consider.
While in the purchase stage they typically conduct final product reviews, develop ROI justifications and look to negotiate terms.
To achieve Gartner’s “hyperautomated, digital-first” engagement with buyers, we recommend creating content that:
Automates and simplifies product comparisons
Provides self-directed and interactive evaluation of customer case studies
Easily enables ROI justification
Facilitates implementation of a POC and even product purchase
A large and growing percentage of consumer sales and many simple B2B purchases are already conducted online. Buyers are now looking to take the next step and extend this digital-first purchase process to complex, enterprise grade products and services.
Addressing this new buyer behavior requires changes in the marketing mindset and in the operation of Demand Generation Programs.
2. Adjust Your Demand Generation Program
As previously noted, most demand generation programs put most of their content creation resources into the early stages of the customer journey. About 46% of the content created by B2B sellers is focused on generating awareness and interest, according to CMI.
We are not advocating that some of these resources be shifted to the middle and later stages of the customer journey. But rather that total resources allocated to marketing and sales be examined in light of changes in buyer behavior. And that, of the total, more resources be allocated to enabling the digital-first approach previously explained.
Demand generation programs must then create content and touch points that focus on building trust early in the customer journey and facilitating buyer self-guided interactions in the consideration and purchase stages. Creating such late-stage tools will no doubt rely on AI to ensure they are dynamically customized to the individual buyers needs and circumstances.
Accomplishing these objectives requires significant changes in the operation of demand generation programs. Some example include:
Developing a deeper understanding of the target customer and their business challenges and imperatives
Creating buyer-focused content that educates without promoting a specific solution
Changing SEO strategy so buyers can find early-stage content when they aren’t yet sure what they are looking for
Creating interactive content targeting later stages of the customer journey when buyers are comparing solutions and trying to validate choices
Cultivating a new mindset where marketers assume responsibility for enabling buyers to move through the customer journey with little to no interaction with sales representatives
Simply put, demand generation programs should be redesigned to educate and build trust early in the customer journey, and to make product comparison and purchase easy and digital-first towards the latter stages of their journey.
3. Redesign Your Sales Process
Data and analysis of B2B buyer behavior from organizations such as Gartner, Forrester, CMI and others make clear that a significant shift is underway in how buyers of complex, enterprise-grade solutions want to purchase such products and services.
Not surprisingly, this new behavior mirrors what nearly all consumers have become comfortable with over the past decade – self-directed product comparison and digital purchase without the involvement of a salesperson.
As a result of this changing buyer behavior, sellers need to change how they organize and operate their sales operations.
How organizations respond to this change in buyer behavior will be highly dependent on the industry and type of product/service. But we recommend all organizations consider:
Using the exercise of realigning the customer journey to clearly articulate when and how sales representatives will interact with buyers
Tightening up the integration between marketing and sales teams to create a more dynamic relationship that leverages the skills of both organizations
Reallocating some resources – money and talent – from sales to marketing to develop the type of self-service, interactive tools described above that meet Gartner’s highly-automated, digital-first buying experience
Conclusion
Dramatic changes such as those discussed in this article typically do not come easy to large, complex organizations. But those sellers who do alter their marketing and sales practices to align with the new buyer behavior will garner significant competitive advantage.
We will delve into specific aspects of the recommended changes in subsequent articles.
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Next Steps
For deeper insights into how to make your demand generation program more effective, reach out to us directly or via LinkedIn at Bob Finlayson or Paul Brunato.
