Optimizing the B2B Buying Journey: Insights for Revenue + Marketing Teams

For the past decade, I’ve advocated for tech marketers to remember “it’s not all about you.” And, I wish I had been clear that this applies to sales pros too. In 2014, I presented LinkedIn research pointing to how annoyed buyers were with the way tech companies are speaking at them. Fast forward to today and sure, some improvements have been made. But, we’re certainly not fully evolved in our approach to delivering highly valuable content, insights, and perspectives to our customers or prospects. 

At G2, we recently released our annual Software Buyer Behavior Report, based on a survey of more than 1,000 global, B2B decision makers. As trust continues to play an increasingly important role in the purchase journey, we saw that buyers are leaning less on vendors to research solutions and more on their peers and other trusted sources – while at the same time embracing self-service channels to take on even more ownership of the process. That’s why we’re calling 2022 the “age of the buyer.” 

As I examine the buyers' wants uncovered in this report, I overlay them with the way tech companies think internally about the sales process. With this in mind, I wanted to share my takeaways across the buyer journey, including: pre-sale, implementation, adoption, and renewal. 

Pre-sale: Compared to last year, we found that B2B decision makers prefer to buy from vendors less (down 9 percentage points), and third-party marketplaces and value-added resellers more (up 6 and 4 points, respectively). 

• The Revenue Insight: Buyers are controlling where they buy with a notable shift toward marketplaces and VARs. As a CDW veteran myself, I know first-hand how powerful it is for a buyer to work with someone who can think about their holistic needs and make recommendations for interoperable solutions across vendors. As a CRO, are you thinking about your channel strategy enough? Buyers will choose a competitor if they’re available in a marketplace and you are not, so you must be thinking about being available where your Buyers are and how to create a cohesive customer experience that minimizes channel conflicts. Channel conflicts always get the customer caught in the middle and push them away from you.
• The Marketing Insight: We all know that buyers are conducting research on their own and trying to avoid lead forms while they learn, compare, and decide who to buy from. They’ll reach out only when they’re ready. This doesn’t mean vendors are completely cut out. There is a role to play, it’s just changing. For instance… are you building your brand presence, discoverability, and call-to-actions on the destinations buyers are using organically? Of course your website should represent your brand and solutions well, but buyers trust you less on your own. You have to connect your website and content to the top destinations buyers are using like G2.com and LinkedIn. You need to blend your direct content with authentic 3rd party validated content. Also, you must ungate your content so buyers can learn more about your solutions and learn from your thought leadership. If you’re gating everything, you’re likely seeing low form fill rates and fake contact data that will only waste your sales teams’ time. You can create handraiser moments instead that keep control in a buyer's hands to give their info when they’re ready.

Implementation: An overwhelming 93% of buyers surveyed indicated that the quality of the implementation process is important or very important when making the decision to renew a software product. 

• The Revenue Insight: Implementations are a part of the reviews on G2 that buyers look at regularly to understand ‘ease of setup.’ They look for insights that can help their implementation plan to mitigate issues reviewers shared as well as leverage techniques reviewers used to make it easier.  Revenue leaders, are you providing new customers with a set of best practices and a checklist for them to prepare for implementation? Have you set expectations about how long the implementation should take? If not, you’re leaving the success of implementation to chance and, worse even, not creating a shared agreement of what success will look like with each customer. For example, you may consider a 90-day implementation to be a win, when the customer expected it to take 45 days.
• The Marketing Insight: Are you helping the customer marketing team get new customers ready to implement, and checking in during and after implementation for feedback? There’s an opportunity to be a source of independent feedback to share with the implementation team and the sales team who will own this relationship. 

Adoption: “Ease of Use” ranked as the third most important buying consideration, yet only 13% of software buyers use tools to track software adoption. 

• The Marketing Insight: G2 buyers regularly seek out ‘ease of use’ insights to determine if a vendor will be a headache to work with, or really live up to its promises. The biggest challenge I’ve seen is that tech companies have not invested well in customer marketing, while focusing too much on prospecting. Yes, broad reach branding and prospecting is important, but customer marketing isn’t an expensive technique (you already have opted-in emails in your CRM/automation tool). And it’s a hugely beneficial productivity gain for the sales teams who are struggling to manage all the relationships in their client roster. I’ve seen first-hand how strong customer marketing can create higher adoption of key product features, generate client outreach to learn about new products (hello expansion revenue!), and keep clients engaged with your brand in a way they can control (yes, less vendor meetings for the client).
• The Revenue Insight: Quality of support is another key input buyers use G2 reviews to understand about the vendors they are considering. You must create a thriving, happy base of customers and empower them to share their opinions about your products. You also cannot hide from negative feedback. Customer NPS programs paired with Buyer Intent signals are the modern way of gathering information about customer behavior, happiness, and likelihood to churn in the future. Do you have a cross-functional program to regularly collect customer NPS, request reviews from all customers, and someone who aggregates the insights from these customer inputs to fix issues, spotlight customer successes, and help the customer success team track their clients’ health? I know this isn’t easy which is why G2 has forged partnerships with companies like Medalia, Pendo, and Delighted to help with this – connecting our solutions to provide an easier approach to tracking client health scores. And personally, I gain tremendous value learning from our own process. We reply to negative comments about our solutions or customer service and adapt our processes accordingly, and/or coach our team members.

Renewal: When a software product is up for renewal, the buying committee is more likely to have changed from when the product was originally purchased: 55% said it's the same, compared to 61% who reported this in 2021, while 22% said it's not the same, compared to 16% in 2021.

• The Marketing  & Revenue Insight: Organizations must shift their customer marketing during renewals to focus on educational communications about the value of their solutions. This means showcasing upcoming innovations (new product features, integrations, customer support) and partnering with the revenue team on renewal alerts to ensure customers know what deadlines and decisions are coming. While Marketing is doing scaled education, Revenue teams need to ensure they’re openly communicating with their known stakeholders and asking who else will be a part of the decision to renew. Multi-threaded relationships aren't new in Sales but it’s also under-utilized in renewals where we see Buyers sharing their vendors focus on their main champion.  Does your Sales team have activity (emails / meetings) with multiple contacts across the client?

What I said in 2014 stands true today. Buyers are still annoyed with tech companies and the way they communicate. Despite our progress toward omnichannel approaches, savvier tactics, and greater efficiency, what’s changed most is that buyers have more control. As sales and marketing professionals, it’s up to us to let them own the journey, but do our jobs to guide them, be a resource, and meet them on the channels they prefer.