What you need to know

• The B2B sales process is more complex than ever, with the members of buying committees more disparate and opaque than ever before, and the motivations of buyers changing to reflect to growing purchasing power of digital natives. To make things harder, many of those buyers in an organisation's purchasing ecosystem are hidden, and happy to say that way.
• At a time when buyers see little differentiation between their providers, issues like ethics, community standing, and the way businesses treat their workers are more important than ever before and might give sellers an edge - if they have a good story to tell and are willing to tell it, recent Dentsu research revealed.
• At a time when incumbency is less of an advantage than ever, brands also need to reflect the will of the buyers more than ever, Dentsu along with research from Green Hat demonstrates.
• That is especially so in an environment where those buyers have mostly already made up their minds before they go to market.

Complexity in the B2B buying world has been long understood, though not always reflected in marketing strategies that prioritise performance in advertising or target only the most senior decision-makers in field marketing.

In 2019, technology research firm Gartner was already ringing the bell flagging the B2B buying journey was undergoing significant changes, with a shift from traditional selling approaches to a more complex, information-driven buying process.

For sales leaders, that meant adapting sales strategies to align with the new buying realities, which include leveraging data and analytics, specialisation among roles, and enhancing customer engagement. Cue marketers and the need to accept the growing influence of purchasing ecosystems inside companies.

Research outfits like Gartner, along with its long-time rival Forrester, have already pegged onto the preference buyers have to undertake their own research through digital channels. The reality for B2B vendors is decisions were already well formed and sometimes locked in long before a prospect popped up on the radar.

Rapid digitalisation, along with the workplace changes ushered in by Covid simply accelerated the process. Now, new research from Dentsu suggests not only are these trends more pronounced, there are demographic changes to navigate as digital natives take greater control of the corporate purse strings.

A fresh study by Green Hat also confirms APAC B2B buyers are almost three-quarters of the way along the buying journey before sellers get a look in. According to its APAC B2B Buyer Journey Research report, "Up to that time, they have been researching the business problem, finding solution options and building a vendor shortlist. In APAC, on average, this buying process takes up to 13 months and involves 12.8 people in the buying party."

Green Hat reported 82 per cent of buyers have mostly defined their requirements before they reach out to vendors. Furthermore, 82 per cent of the time, the buyer contacts their preferred seller first, and that seller is the one who usually gets the business.

As Green Hat's managing director Stuart Jaffray told Mi3, "Buyers know what they’re shopping for, they want to buy from someone that they think they can trust and they want to be able to compare them."

According to the APAC Buyer Journey report, "The implications are far-reaching. Who are the members of this buying party? How can vendors influence the process while the buyer is researching and shortlisting? What type of content will have the best chance of cut-through? How and when should the vendors reach out during the journey? And how can vendors be front-of-mind so the buyer calls, and ideally calls them first?"

Answering those questions requires a fair stab at identifying the decision makers on the buying party and their relative power in the process. That problem is made more complicated by the fact buyers in the mix - as noted in a Bain Institute study - can be hidden. This further impacts how vendors engage and influence the buying process.

Green Hat noted the Bain study identified product buyers who care about the solution performance and technicalities, while process buyers are more concerned with risk and compliance. This latter group is mostly hidden from vendors, even when vendors have been invited to engage the safety net buyers who look to issues such as reputation and perception.

"These buying party members veto vendors from the product buyers’ shortlist if they do not pass their risk assessment," Green Hat cautions.

As a practical example, Mi3 Australia was told by one of the leading industry associations in the marketing and customer experience space that martech vendors who have been largely uninterested in the privacy debate have suddenly started asking for briefings in the last six months. The reason: They are losing business because they haven't been able to answer the privacy "What ifs" and now want to get ahead of these objections.

A new kind of trust

Dentsu's Superpowers Index released last week, the fourth in the series, reinforced findings of earlier studies about the opacity of what it called "Buying Committees" and the impact these groups have on the B2B sales cycle. Additionally, as buying groups grow and the complexity of the buying experience increases, the study revealed buyers find it harder to spot differences between brands.  

Dentsu B2B APAC President Kiaran Geen told Mi3 at the time, "In the sea of sameness, you've got to make sure that you have every weapon your brand has [at its disposal] to actually be successful in that sales cycle because it is brutal out there."

The Superpowers report suggested the gap between winning and losing brands is shrinking. "As small margins increasingly tip the balance between success and failure, reviewing the strength of your buyer experience in detail is imperative."

The study also highlighted how the priorities of buyers are becoming more personal. Issues such as "being a good employer," being ethical and lawful, and treating suppliers, and business partners. and communities with care are three of the top five decision drivers, according to Dentsu. Functionality, support and expertise rank in the lower half of the top ten. Price didn't rate a mention.

There's a lesson in this for marketers, said Keen, who has been tracking changes in corporate buyer behaviour for years.

"The only people that are closely connected to the customer are clearly marketers. Marketing can know more about the buying cohort than sales because sales will only know what they know. They don't know how to ask different questions. They don't know what landing pages inside an organisation that customer is researching," he said.

Through access to marketing and customer analysts, marketers are better placed in this new buyer journey ecosystem. "It's the legacy of where B2B brand marketers have come from... People [need to] understand who you are and what you can do. You're not on the buying committee."

For Keen, it's that legacy that's the biggest thing Australian marketers need to get over.

"They need to be proud, or they need to educate the organisation about the power of what a brand does because that's where customers set off from," he added.