On average, customers will will contact a sales rep after they have independently completed about 60% of the purchasing decision process.
So says a recent survey by the highly respected Corporate Executive Board of over 1.900 businesses, aimed at uncovering B2B purchasing trends.
Please pause for a second before reading the rest of this article and think what that means for your own business.
This single data point has fundamental and important implications for those responsible for a businesses revenue, lead generation processes and tactics.
There are many other data points that are regularly quoted about the percentage of B2B buyers who commence their buying journey online. For example:
But this data from the CEB is much more impactful as it shows buyers using independent, typically online, resources to "self serve", not only to commence their buying process but the data shows they continue deep into the purchasing journey.
If you are in any way responsible for revenue generation either as
Whilst most firms have a sales and marketing plan, the "era of the buyer" requires you to rethink this plan.
Understand your buyer (or in most cases, multiple buyers) you need to influence. These are people NOT market segments! Sales people get this. They deal with real people every day. Marketers need to take the time to genuinely understand the challenges and problems facing their buyers every day and build messaging and content that responds to these challenges.
Accept that your website is your lead generation "home plate" to use a baseball term. Redefine your funnel maths with this in mind. Think of this as your upside down funnel (or back to front pipeline, if you prefer).
Stop thinking about campaigns and start thinking engagement. In a world where the buyer is in control of so much of the buying decision process, you won't know when a buyer is ready to engage with you or progress to the next stage of the purchase process. Marketers who continue to build campaigns, and make offers, around products and product features will be perceived as "tone deaf" to the multichannel buyer. Customers will engage with marketers who meet their needs for different information and options during the buying journey.
This means building a lead generation framework that sits in place ready to serve the needs of your buyer at a time and place of their choosing. Specifically this means such thiings as:Equally this means STOPPING tactics that interrupt buyers and attempt to attract them when they are not engaged in the buying process and talk about you and your undoubtably world class products or services. These tactics are inappropriate, ineffective and expensive.
As a business leader you know all major investments should be measurable. Resources are limited so every investment requires a return. Marketing has traditionally been seen as a cost centre with little provable link to revenue. This has now changed.
Running a revenue generation machine without the help of robust tools is challenging.
Marketing automation is one class of software that's seeing very strong growth currently and with good reason. Building and managing many of the ingredients listed above would be impossible, or require an unaffordable legion of marketers to administer. Most of the software is sold using a SAAS model and monthly fees are the equivalent in most cases to single day ot two fees of a marketing contractor. At g2m we work with Hubspot software primarily, but there are a number of excellent tools available.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software is another indispensable tool for those responsible for revenue. Once again there are dozens of excellent tools from free products such as Zoho to powerful and affordable options such as Pipedrive and Sugar CRM to industry leaders Salesforce.com.
Business leaders and owners should ask their heads of sales marketing to collaborate and ensure the tools are selected to work together, pushing data between the applications. This is very important as its allows reports to be generated with "one version of the truth." The clarity this provides allows the senior team to focus on what action needs to be taken to:
We have written an eBook on how to build a smart lead generation function. Please feel free to download it. Equally, if you would like to take advantage of our complementary Revenue Generation Audit and Assessment, please contact us.