After COVID-19, the B2B buyer may never be the same.
In her information-packed talk from the Citrix Partner Marketing Kickoff 2021, featured speaker Lori Wizdo, Forrester VP and Senior Analyst, shares that the pandemic accelerated three major trends disrupting today’s B2B market:
- Information ubiquity: Today’s B2B buyers have access to more detailed information about products, services, and vendors.
- Millennial decision-makers: Millennial buyers have different preferences than their predecessors. Not only are they digitally self-sufficient, but they’re also comfortable with asynchronous communication versus face-to-face sales meetings.
- Consumer experiences: B2B buyers are consumers first, and they’ve come to expect a seamless consumer experience from B2B vendors.
These trends (along with COVID-19 as the catalyst) are changing B2B buyer behavior, putting all businesses at risk. Here’s why:
Longer Decision Times
Decision cycles are taking longer. That means businesses need to plan for longer intervals between prospect and profit and align their marketing efforts to avoid losing — or turning off — a prospect in the process.
Bigger Buying Teams
If you thought yesterday’s buying team was complicated, wait until you meet Buying Team 2.0. Not only are different people involved in the process at different stages, but they have different questions, needs, and outcomes that they want addressed.
Decreasing Engagement
While it may seem easy to point to the pandemic as the reason in-person engagement is decreasing, it’s not that simple. With more and more digitally native millennial buyers who prefer to do their own online due diligence first, the preference for face-to-face meetings has dropped significantly. In fact, Forrester reports that 60 percent of buyers don’t want a sales rep to be their primary source of information, and 62 percent say they can identify solution selection criteria and shortlist vendors based solely on digital content.
Increasing Churn
The reality is today’s B2B buyers are less loyal. This can increase churn, sending you back to square one to regroup and recoup. Projected revenue isn’t guaranteed, and even a legacy customer can switch to a competitor at a moment’s notice.
So, how do we need to change our marketing mindset to keep up with these trends? The good news is that Lori has answers. We recommend checking out her entire talk for all the juicy details. Here are some highlights:
- Add a go-to-customer layer in your marketing strategy. The sales meeting is becoming a relic. In the new B2B landscape, marketing now plays a bigger role in attracting and advancing prospective customers. Sandwiched between your corporate strategy and product strategy, the go-to-customer strategy focuses on audiences and outcomes to give you more traction with KDMs.
- Reframe your marketing from selling products to selling outcomes. Traditional value propositions focus on products and work outward to customer outcomes. Instead, ask yourself, “What outcomes are customers trying to achieve?” The new mindset demands we think of outcomes first, then identify our solutions that help customers reach them.
- Guide your buyer through the journey. Every buyer goes through some iteration of a buyer’s journey and within each stage of the journey, buyers can take many different actions. It’s now the B2B marketer’s job to identify which stakeholders are involved at each stage and what activities they’ll engage in due to their role and engineer a more fully realized buyer journey to maximize engagement.
Don’t miss Lori’s talk (along with the recorded Q&A) in the Citrix Partner Marketing Kickoff 2021 video library.
