About the Session
This session is part of the “Science of B2B” series led by Kerry Cunningham, Head of 6sense Research and Thought Leadership. The series aims to present and discuss various research findings related to B2B marketing and selling. This particular session continues to explore the implications of the “point of first contact constant” and delves into buyer behavior during the initial 70% of their journey.
Agenda
The session started with a recap of key insights from the previous episodes, followed by a detailed analysis of buyer behavior during the first 70% of their journey. Future episodes will continue to explore the length of buying cycles, the role of additional vendors in the buying process, and strategies to facilitate easier decision-making for buyers.
Takeaways
Takeaway 1: Buyers conduct extensive research before engaging with sellers.
Kerry Cunningham emphasized that buyers prefer to decide what they want independently before interacting with sellers. On average, a buying team engages in over 4,300 interactions during the buying journey, with only 640 involving vendors.
Takeaway 2: The number of interactions with vendors is consistent across roles.
Regardless of their role in the organization, whether influencers or decision-makers, buying team members have approximately the same number of interactions with vendors. The financial ratifiers even tend to have slightly more interactions than the champions.
Takeaway 3: Vendors must make the buying process easier for buyers.
Kerry stressed the importance of vendors enabling buyers by providing easily accessible and useful content. Ensuring that content is findable and removing barriers like forms can significantly improve a vendor’s chances of winning the business.
Insights Surfaced
- Buyers conduct the majority of their research independently before engaging with vendors.
- Interaction levels with vendors are consistent across different roles within the buying team.
- Making the buying process easier for buyers can improve a vendor’s chances of success.
- The buying journey involves a substantial amount of work and decision-making.
Key Quotes
“There are more than 4,000 interactions in a typical buying journey, just a small fraction of which are with vendors.”
“Whether you’re an influencer or the ultimate decision maker, you’re having somewhere between 15 and 20 interactions with each vendor.”
“If you have content that could be useful to your buyers in any way, get it out in front of forms.”
“The buying process is very difficult, and whether the person is a high-level person in the organization or an individual contributor, they’re doing a lot of research to understand how to solve their needs.”
Future Topics
Kerry outlined plans for future webinars and research, promising to delve deeper into the length of buying cycles and the impact of adding additional vendors to the evaluation process. Upcoming episodes will also explore the proportion of website traffic with form fills versus anonymous traffic and strategies to address these issues.
Next time, the series will focus on understanding the length of the buying cycle and the impact of additional vendors on the process. Further episodes will discuss the role of anonymous traffic on websites and how marketers can better identify and engage these potential buyers.
