Marketing of business-to-business (B2B) solutions has clearly become more difficult over the past several years. This is evident in research undertaken with the International Data Corporation (IDC), a global provider of market intelligence for the information technology, telecommunications and consumer technology markets. The research indicates that:
- 62% of B2B suppliers now need more leads in order to generate the same amount of sales
- 72% indicate an increase in buying cycle time over the past six months, while the buying cycle timeframe has increased over 10% in the past 12 months
Two economic downturns over the past decade have made buyers more spendthrift, and more sceptical of suppliers’ claims. Fuelled by a wealth of online resources and social networks, buyers have seized control of the buying cycle, engaging with sales representatives later and later, and further elongating sales cycles. Marketers are scrambling to address the power shift and overcome lead generation and conversion issues by delivering more content and tools over more channels to actively engage ever more empowered, sceptical and frugal buyers.
According to research by Junta42 & MarketingProfs, “engage or perish” is becoming the defining tag-line driving many new B2B marketing strategies with:
- 51% of B2B marketers increasing their spending in content marketing over the next 12 months
- Over a quarter of the total marketing and communications budget now going toward content marketing
- Nine of 10 B2B marketers leveraging content marketing as part of their marketing programmes.
Five Trends Shaping Today’s B2B Buyer
In my research with the IDC, integrated B2B marketing company, SiriusDecisions, and other partners, we have found that there are five key trends in buyer behaviour reinforcing one another to define the need for different, and perhaps even more investment in content marketing programmes in 2011 and beyond.
The organisations that recognise these significant and fundamental B2B buyer changes, and align their content marketing budgets to empower buyers, engage one-to-one, build trust, address economically focused buyers and enable sales to engage with more value will be the future winners. Let us examine each of the trends and research in detail:
1. Internet Fuelled Buying Cycles
The Internet has made more information available via more channels, and this wealth of information is being leveraged by buyers to make key purchase decisions, redefining how, when and where buyers engage, select and purchase your solutions.
In the business-to-consumer (B2C) space, the Internet has dramatically impacted how books, apparel, electronics, music, cars and other goods are bought and sold. The consumer is now in charge: researching specifications, configuring and customising solutions, getting peer reviews and advice, comparing prices, and “buying now”. In many instances, sales forces and channel partners have been disintermediated, where direct contact with the buyer has been replaced with online interaction. And the shift to “buyer control” has seen the rise of new retail channels and marketing sites with substantial competitive impact for those who embraced and leveraged the shift, and those who lagged behind.
These B2C buyers now rely on suppliers’ websites, independent buyer guides, and social networks to help guide their decisions, and as a result, B2C marketers have had to visibly change to meet these demands. The marketer’s development and delivery of online content and decision-making tools has played an important role in fuelling and automating the buying cycle, reviews and transactions. For example, automotive sites now provide more tools than ever to guide buyer’s decisions, including customised configurators and pricing tools, competitive comparison tools, video brochures, and Facebook ‘fan’ pages.
Analysts such as Forrester and Gartner are highlighting ‘consumerisation’ of business as a key trend for the next several years, and B2B marketing is one area that will face the ‘consumerisation” change, making content marketing and interactive decision support tools more important than ever before. Evidence of this shift can be found in the IDC’s 2010 Customer Experience Survey. When asked, over 200 B2B solution buyers now felt that the most important part of the overall purchase process was supplier content, with over one third of the buyers citing this content as key to the purchase decision.
Content may indeed be king to the Internet fuelled buying cycle. IDC survey results indicate that buyers rely on supplier content more than on direct supplier engagements with technical teams, sales representatives and executives in making key purchase decisions. With a wealth of information available at the click of a mouse, buyers are doing more of their own research and evaluations online, relying less and less on vendor interaction to progress through the decision-making cycle. Sales teams are being engaged later and later in the sales cycle.
Marketers recognising this shift are providing the content needed at each stage of the lifecycle to fuel the decision-making process. Favoured Content Sources According to SiriusDecision buyer studies, the most favoured sources of content during the early stages of B2B decisionmaking are:
- White papers (64,4%)
- Peer referrals (51,1%)
- Webinars (48,9%)
- Trials or demos (42,2%)
- Analyst reports (37,8%)
In later stages of the sales cycle, analyst reports and peer referrals reign supreme.
2. Information Overload
Although buyers extensively use and rely on supplier information to make purchase decisions, most of today’s buyers indicate that they suffer from ‘information overload’ as a result of current “carpet bombing” marketing strategies.
Many of us have experienced this phenomenon, getting more content from more sources than ever before. According to SiriusDecisions, just looking at e-blasts alone, the typical buyer receives over 20 email marketing messages a week, up 32% over the past four years. And this is but one of several traditional and online channels that are proactively providing information on a daily basis to prospects. Instead of being engaged, buyers are now inundated with more meaningless product information, offers and “noise”, creating a condition often referred to as “marketing fatigue”.
One of the keys to cutting through the noise is to provide buyers with more personalised and meaningful content to transcend generic messaging and create an engaging dialogue. The power of personalisation is real. According to MarketingSherpa and KnowledgeStorm surveys, when content is customised, buyers indicate that the content is much more effective at capturing prospect attention, and most importantly, converting prospects into buyers.
Relevance to Market Segment
The customisation of the content can be generated in different ways to be sure it is relevant to the particular persona and characteristics of the buyer, such as using:
- Visitor click activity to determine what information is presented next on the website, or what offers or content to serve
- Registration profiles to customise the online web content presented, or scheduled email blast content sent
- Interactive white paper and assessment tools that ask the customer a few questions and then tune the white paper content or customised assessment benchmarks interactively based on profile, stage in buying cycle, opportunity, pain points and need.
According to a survey by marketing automation firm Silverpop of B2B marketers, even though customisation is very effective, only 35% of marketers said they were using dynamic content today. However, of those that did, the results of personalised content have been impressive, with 93% saying it worked better for them than traditional content, and 43% reporting that it “worked great.”
3. Matter of Trust
Although buyers clearly rely on supplier content to do research and make important purchase decisions, and not having this content in today’s Internet fuelled buying cycle can be fatal, a conundrum exists where suppliers are not always perceived as a trusted source. Perhaps this is because of the overload of marketing messages received daily, or the boldness of such messages or claims, or the fact that at the end of the day the supplier is ultimately there to sell something, but the research confirms that buyers are sceptical of content produced and provided by suppliers.
Buyer survey results from SiriusDecisions indicate that the most trusted sources of marketing content information through the buying lifecycle are industry analysts (cited by 31,4% of respondents), and peers (28,7%), especially early in the lifecycle.
The influence of suppliers as a trusted source of information lags dramatically, at only 8,1% this year, an increase from 3,1% in 2006, but still much lower on the trust scale than almost all other sources. Internet fuelled buying decisions rely on creating a credible and meaningful connection to the buyer, overcoming the virtual nature of the medium to create trust. Because buyers are researching solutions online, they cannot look a sales person in the eyes to determine credibility.
To overcome the scepticism, it is important for content marketers to provide the right content to bridge the credibility gap, including analyst reviews, user testimonials and success stories, third party validation of research and financial justifications, and cultivation of independent peer reviews and feedback.
4. Frugalnomics
According to Forrester analyst Scott Santucci, go-to-market models always change during periods of disruption, and the Great Recession has certainly caused its share of turmoil. “The more buying organisations are forced to do-more-withless they adopt different business patterns,” says Santucci.
I term the current shift Frugalnomics, where two successive economic downturns over the past decade have resulted in an economically focused buyer who demands quantifiable proof that each investment will yield a beneficial bottom line impact and provide maximum value compared to alternatives. According to Santucci, the Frugalnomics focus has significant and fundamental strategy implications. “Today, buyers are looking for business partners that will help them drive business results or outcomes – rather than bundle their products and services into solutions.”
With Frugalnomics, buyers are inclined to not make significant investments or changes, and as a result, customers need to be armed with the tools to “make the case for change”. Unfortunately, most buyers are inclined to “do nothing” during periods of uncertainty; however, there is a “cost to doing nothing”.
Customers need to be armed with the tools to quantify the cost of indecision and the positive bottom line impact these changes can have. In order to attract, connect and capture frugal buyers, marketers need to produce content that raises economic interest, quantifies value, and boosts urgency at a time when it’s easier to do nothing than make a wrong investment. According to IDC research, over 90% of surveyed decision-makers now require quantifiable proof of bottom line benefits on most projects. The larger the purchase, the more formal financial due diligence is required.
However, even though financial impact analysis is required, two thirds (65%) of buyers indicate that they do not have the knowledge or tools needed to do business value assessments and calculations. As a result, over 81% of buyers expect suppliers to quantify the business value of proposed solutions. Content marketers must develop content and dynamic sales tools to engage and empower economic buyers, including research, interactive and traditional white papers, webinars and dynamic sales tools, to help quantify the value of proposed solutions, return on investment (ROI) calculators, and competitive total cost of ownership (TCO) comparisons.
5. Death of the Salesman?
Because of Internet fuelled buying cycles, sales is being invited later and later to the table, and in some cases, not at all. Buyers can now use the Internet to research and assess opportunities for improvements, find and get solution recommendations, make the financial case for change, compare and contrast competitive options and pricing, and they often make the purchase online. So what is the role of a sales person in such an empowered buyer environment, and will this lead to an end of sales as we know it?
According to SiriusDecisions, focusing on marketing costs per sales person indicates that on average companies invest a significant $43 011 per sales person, an estimated 3% to 7% of the opportunity value of the sales pipeline. However, research by the IDC recognises that although sales enablement investments are significant, the investments may not be delivering on promises. Surveys reveal that buyers are not satisfied with the value sales professionals are delivering to engagements.
In a recent survey, 24% of buyers indicated that the sales reps are not prepared for presentations at all, 30% indicate that they are somewhat prepared, and only 29% indicate that they are well prepared. The lack of preparation has been directly shown to drive inefficient conversion, longer sales cycles, more discounting and higher competitive losses.
Over the next five years it is clear that sales has to change to meet empowered buyer needs and continue to add value to the engagement. Content marketing plays an important role in arming sales professionals with the content and dynamic sales tools to reshape the way they engage and connect with ever more frugal, sceptical and empowered buyers.
Marketing needs to play a clear role to either help redefine the sales role and empower sales professionals with the content and tools needed to add value in the buying cycle, or simply remove sales from the process altogether, empowering buyers directly with the content, tools and channel to make their own decisions and buy on their own. It is likely, as we have seen in B2C, that marketing will need to both help redefine sales engagements and empower direct buying content and channels.
