The B2B sales process for most business sectors is complex and often misunderstood. Typically with B2B sales there are multiple layers of people in an organisation that have to be convinced before you can close a sale. 

Many B2B sales teams still rely on outdated strategies: hitting large lists with generic emails, calling prospects cold, and hoping something sticks. But with so much buyer research happening independently and online, sellers often reach out too early, or worse, to the wrong people entirely. This creates friction and wastes resources.

The graphic below from Gartner is a good representation of the complexity and hurdles that need to be overcome in order to progress a sales prospect along the B2B sales journey.

Each contact within a sales process is looking to satisfy different needs, to help them address particular concerns and support them in reaching their aspirations and goals.

And in any sales journey there is always that added layer of complexity when you get different stakeholders, all with their different vying agendas all with different roles, as a user, versus an influencer or a blocker versus the actual buyer.

Each stakeholder that can influence a buying decision may have different priorities ranging from price to customer service to efficiency. Because of these variables it’s common to adopt a sales approach to prospect blindly and hope for the best if you contact enough people.

A lack of insight into the decision making process can make the entire sales process feel daunting and unproductive for you, and a point of friction for those that you approach who are either not ready or uninterested.

Gartner identified six B2B buying “jobs” that a prospective B2B customer must complete in order to get to the end of a sales process and successfully finalise a purchase:

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

And sellers don’t always hold all the cards when it comes to negotiations, they have little opportunity nowadays to influence customer decisions to the scale that they used to be able to do pre-internet days.

The ready availability of quality information through digital channels has made it far easier for buyers to gather information independently (without sales help).

According to Gartner sellers have less access and fewer opportunities to influence customer decisions.

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 anyone sales rep may be only 5% or 6%.

The reality is that a sales prospect will find you when they’re good and ready; no matter how much effort you put into chasing them down.

According to a SiriusDecisions Study on B-to-B Buyer Behaviour – “Up to 67 per cent of the buyer’s journey now occurs digitally, shortening the actual time for sales engagement.”

The Challenges a B2B buyer faces:

• The decision challenge – does the buyer have a full and robust decision-making process in place?
• Switching process – it is common to have customers that do not buy because they are unsure about the costs and changes involved if you are switching suppliers.
• VFM (value for money) – is the buyer able to measure the added value impact of your solution?
• Requirements list for a new system – that include implementation elements and employee training needs.
• Prioritised list of technology requirements to help them choose the right vendor.

Understanding the Buying Journey

To succeed, sellers must align with the buyer’s actual decision-making process or better known as the Buying Journey.

What is the buying journey? The B2B buying journey is the process that business buyers go through to become aware of a problem, evaluate potential solutions, and make a purchase decision.

Awareness Stage

• The buyer realises they have a problem to solve or opportunity to take advantage of.
  
• They begin research to understand what the symptoms they are experiencing as a business imply.
  
• Marketing opportunity: Create educational content—blog posts, guides, explainer videos—that helps the buyer define their problem.
  

Consideration Stage

• The buyer defines the problem and researches and evaluates possible solutions.
  
• They compare vendors, products, or services.
  
• Marketing opportunity: Offer comparison content—whitepapers, webinars, case studies, and product pages—to show how your solution solves their problem.
  

Decision Stage

The buyer chooses a solution and justifies it to other stakeholders in the buying group.

• They assess ROI, customer support, and time to implement, etc.
  
• Marketing opportunity: Provide strong proof—demos, testimonials, ROI calculators, and tailored proposals.
  

The Decision Making Process in detail

Awareness Stage

Buyers only begin to search when they realise that a particular need or pain is having an impact on business performance. This stage is driven by search engines, peer recommendations, and educational content on your website. Word of mouth still reigns, amplified by digital platforms like LinkedIn and Reddit.

Prospective buyers are actively searching for content that alludes to the same type of symptoms that they are having, very much a read and learn phase where buyers are trying to get up to speed with what is happening, what are the causes and to begin to put thoughts together around how to find a solution.

Most of us don’t really start a search for an answer until we know what is the question – so, at this early stage of the buying process your content needs to be based on a foundation of helping prospective buyers to recognise that their business is suffering from certain “symptoms”. 

Which is the starting point of your dialogue – get the buyer to recognise that they have a problem.

The content you produce needs to tap into particular symptoms so that those that you engage with can see that you understand what challenges they are facing, which builds trust and authority in your solution. There is no value in talking in general terms, this will make you a “Jack or may be a John of all trades”.

It is better to already start to filter out visitors to your website that they themselves can see your business is not going to be a good solution fit. And this is less about your competency and more about being targeted in the way you present your solution, so that it appeals to your target audience.

This is a good time in the buying process to show that you have patience, it is far more effective to teach and inform than prematurely try to sell a solution for a problem that the prospective customer does not know they have.

Remember that it’s typically from our peers and colleagues that we first learn about particular vendors and their solutions, so give the same importance and priority to every touch point. At an early stage in the process it is difficult to know what role the different people you meet play which means every contact is important in terms of the impression you make.

Plus B2B buyers are far more likely to trust information from a third party – an unbiased and credible resource rather than the information that they receive directly from the vendor themselves.

Consideration Stage

As prospective customers carry out their research across various channels buyers want to learn—not be sold to. 

At this stage they are seeking white papers, webinars, case studies, and comparison tools. Your content must exist where they look, have a “red line” and be consistent across all channels. 

At this stage, now that your name as a company is on the radar of potential customers, it is important to be able to create content that provides in-depth knowledge in appropriate content formats.

Decision Stage

Over the years, a significant change in the B2B buying process has been the inclusion of multiple stakeholders and the availability at the click of a mouse of information. That means your prospective customers are coming to meetings armed with a stack of information that they have gathered through self-research. 

The implication for marketers means that we cannot focus our content efforts on one specific person or profile, we need to take into account each of the stakeholders to interpret their motivations.

By the decision stage, most buyers will be familiar with your offering. They’re comparing vendors and building internal consensus. Therefore sellers must tailor messaging to address specific stakeholder concerns—IT wants security and integration; finance wants ROI; users want ease of use, etc.

Buyers today tend to reach out to sales once they are in a position of strength, familiar with the product and already leaning towards a decision.

This means that as B2B vendors we need to be visible and engaged during the research phase of the buying process, and you can’t rely on traditional tactics to get your voice heard over the noise of your competitors in the marketplace.

It is at this stage of the buying process that you need to be very clear how your company addresses the pain or challenges of the prospective buyer. The buyer already knows the basics – so they want to hear the “Why”?

Why your product fits their needs better than anybody else.

The Need For Buyer Personas – A Shift from Selling to Advising

So who is buying from you? What do you know about them? Do you know their pain points, what motivates them, and why they want or need whatever it is that you are selling?

By building a fuller, personalised picture of your prospective customer and their buying journey, as a business you’ll be able to improve the effectiveness of your sales and marketing efforts.

A buyer persona is a semi-fictional character created as a “made-up” picture of your ideal customer. The persona provides rich insight that can be used to guide a sales strategy, help marketers design a campaign and work on customer engagement plans to generate and nurture leads.

 Buyer personas help clarify:

• What your customers care about
• Their pain points and internal challenges
• The decision-making criteria they use

Why use a Buyer persona?

• It’s easier to create relevant content with a real person in mind
• It humanises your customers
• It helps clarify the pain they experience and how you should present your solution

Creating both positive and negative personas (those who will never buy) helps focus time and budget on the right prospects.

Buyers, influencers and users within an organisation will have different values when it comes to assessing and researching products and services.

With multiple stakeholders involved in the decision making process, it is critical that as sellers we identify who is making the decisions and articulate their buying journey as they research and evaluate prospective vendors.

What Is Your Content Strategy?

You cannot afford to neglect your content because it can directly impact how well your website attracts qualified visitors and generates leads. 

It is a world where “content marketing rules”, buyers are more likely to trust third-party sources of information than your own, so you need to make sure that you create content that is relevant and is in a format that can be shared and distributed amongst your target audience. 

Content distribution is a way to extend the reach of your content. A “rule of thumb” is to spend 50% of your efforts on creating the content and the other 50% on distributing it.

How can we help your business?

The newly empowered B2B buyer means that companies must transform their sales and marketing process, shifting focus and impressing upon buyers the desire to offer advice first and foremost rather than dive into a sales dialogue.