How to improve the B2B buyer journey

Marketers often compare the buyer journey to ‘the hero’s journey’ - a classical narrative structure, full of danger and peril, that’s been used by almost every storytelling culture since the Ancient Greeks. Some people might consider this melodramatic, but if Gartner research is anything to go by, your B2B buyer would probably agree with the marketers - 77% of buyers described their last purchase experience as extremely complex or difficult.

Unfortunately, for B2B buyers, not every fellowship (or buying team) gets a happy ending. It's often reported that 95% of buying groups say they have to revisit their purchase decisions at least once.

Sales professionals looking for a co-writing credit on this tale need to do everything they can to help buyers achieve their aim with the minimum of friction (or dragons). In this article, we’ll explore why B2B buyers have such a hard time and how we can remove drama from the B2B buyer journey.

What is the B2B buyer journey?

The B2B buyer journey is exactly what it sounds like - a period of time during which a company becomes aware of a need, identifies a product or service to meet that need, reviews various options, and makes a purchase.

The B2B buyer journey is not the same thing as your sales cycle. The buyer journey can be well underway and several chapters deep before the buyer has even heard of you. That’s why the concept of the buyer journey is as relevant to marketing as it is to sales.

Importance of the B2B buyer journey

If you’re hoping to make sales, the buyer journey is very important to your efforts - especially if your team employs a consultative selling methodology such as MEDDIC, Challenger, or target account selling.

If you want to help the buyer solve their problem, you need to understand how the buyer views their problem. For B2B sales, this is often more complicated than it sounds. B2B buying groups typically involve six to ten stakeholders, each with their own perspective, expectations, knowledge base, requirements from your solution, etc. (As classic stories go, it’s more ‘Crime and Punishment’ than ‘Hungry Caterpillar’).

Stages of the buyer’s journey

It’s important to note that the complexity of B2B buying journeys makes a typical step-by-step breakdown almost meaningless. While there are distinct stages (hopefully ending with a purchase), there are so many moving parts that it’s probably better to think of them as modes rather than stages.

Problems can be misdiagnosed, eventually causing the buyer to return to square one. A lack of awareness of available solutions and benefits early on in the process can completely change the purchase context halfway through. Changes in the buying team can result in unexpected new directions.

As we’ll see shortly, the main purpose of defining the journey stages is to give us a frame of reference when we map out specific buyer journeys for our prospects and products. While the stages are too general on their own, they can help us track the evolution of a deal and understand the ebbs, flows, and thought processes of the stakeholders involved.

We tend to use the 6sense framework as a neat and comprehensive overview of the stages of the B2B buyer journey.

Business as usual

As befits a sales concept that also applies to marketing strategies, the first stage is effectively neutral—the buyer may or may not be aware of their problem, and their journey has yet to begin. At this stage, there are still opportunities for outbound sales activity.

Awareness

Now, the buyer knows there’s a problem - but they haven’t defined it fully yet. An investigation of some kind has begun, in order to understand and identify the problem.

Consideration

The problem is generally understood, and affected stakeholders are informed. The buyer (or buying team) now actively researches solutions and draws up a list of all available options.

Decision

A course of action has been chosen, and the decision-making process is initiated. A shortlist of potential vendors is drawn up and assessed.

Purchase

The buyer commits to the vendor of their choice, purchasing and implementing the solution.

How the B2B buyer journey has changed over time

From the rise of the internet to COVID-19 and beyond, the acceleration of societal and economic change is reflected at every turn by changes in the B2B buyer journey.

Bigger buying teams

The average number of stakeholders in a B2B buying team has risen considerably over the past ten years. This makes it even harder to build consensus, create sales collateral that provides information relevant to the individual stakeholder, and schedule meetings and demos (increasing the length of the sales cycle).

Buyer journeys aren’t linear anymore

In addition to the increased complexity of interaction caused by the larger buying teams, omnichannel content marketing means that much of the information that a seller would share as part of a measured sequence or playbook is already out there for the taking.

Buyers might come to the sales process having absorbed a great deal of information about your product - but with little understanding of how it applies to their use case.

Greater scrutiny

Changing business practices have meant that many companies now put contracts out to tender more often - 77% of companies surveyed reported that they re-tendered their major enterprise deals every two years. The tender process has become increasingly intensive, too, and companies are under greater pressure to demonstrate their competitive differences.

Seller-free buying experiences

The content-marketing-led shift towards informing and educating the buyer means that buyers are empowered to conduct their own research, draw their own conclusions, and decide what they want. This reduces their reliance on sales professionals and sales teams as a source of knowledge.

While the role of sales professionals as trusted advisors in complex sales processes is mostly insulated from this change, the impact on the role of sales professionals in transactional selling models is considerable.

Greater emphasis on values and purpose

As shifting attitudes towards the climate crisis and other societal issues lead companies to place greater emphasis on their social values and ESG policies, B2B buyer journeys have evolved accordingly. 42% of UK companies have already switched suppliers or business partners at least once because their provider didn’t have adequate ESG credentials and commitments.

Mapping the B2B buyer journey

Is mapping out in detail your buyers' journey a fiendishly complicated job? Yes. Is it even worth doing? Yes, absolutely.

As we mentioned earlier, understanding your buyer’s problems is vital to communicating effectively, identifying their pain points, and closing the deal. The mapping process can also uncover recurring patterns in how your various accounts operate and let you make iterative improvements to your sales processes, finding the best way to enable the buyer at every stage.

Here are some pointers to help you create a consistently repeatable buyer journey mapping process.

Create buyer personas

Using your existing customer base as a reference, create detailed personas for the different types of individuals you most commonly encounter in buying groups. Think about their job titles and roles, how often they’ll need to use your solution directly, responsibilities, technical understanding, and priorities.

Company goals vs individual goals

The company goals are usually clearly defined, and they are visible to everyone in a ‘vision-mission-values’ statement or similar document.

The different types of buyers will (presumably) share these goals. However, they’ll support different goals to a greater or lesser degree, depending on their role. They might also have different personal goals they aim to achieve within their professional context.

Create an actual map

This can be a challenge - as we’ve said, the journey is rarely linear and often complex. Using the broad stages of the buyer journey, try and create a representation that allows you to account for:

• Different personas at different stages
• Journeys that move back and forth between the different stages
• Different touchpoints and communication channels used

Use qualitative and quantitative data to enhance your map

Drawing on your analytics, sales conversations, and buyer feedback transcripts, add as much relevant detail as you can to your map. Use the data to answer these questions.

• Where are the bottlenecks and pain points?
• Are there any recurring issues? Do deals often get lost around the same place?
• Is there anything you can automate or streamline using buyer enablement tools?
• Are there missed opportunities to add value or upsell?
  

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Four tips for sales teams to help B2B buyers on their journey

If you want to provide better support for your prospective buyers as they wind their way through their journey to purchase, it is essential that you craft a solid Buyer enablement strategy. While this term has been used in recent years as a use case for sales tools, it also needs to be considered in a broader sense - as a way of building stronger relationships and creating a better customer experience.

Here are four ways you can make the B2B buyer journey easier.

1. Coach your buyers through the process

In consultative selling, you and your buyer are on the same side, trying to achieve the same outcome—solving the buyer's problem or alleviating some type of business pain.

Your role in this process is to provide expert insight, help them weigh available options, and provide sales collateral and messaging that’s easily shared and personalized to the needs of individual stakeholders.

In simpler terms, show them what it looks like to win with your solution.

2. Show that you respect your buyer’s time

This is one of the most important tenets of buyer enablement. Shortening the sales cycle and saving time is a priority for both sellers and buyers.

Every meeting that can be safely ditched, every repeated question that can be avoided, and every process that can be rendered as a simple self-serve website interaction will improve the long-term relationship and make a sale more likely.

Take this a step further by anticipating the needs of your buyer so they have everything they need at their fingertips and don't need to wait for you to provide it.

3. Align your sales process with the buyer journey

Sometimes, less is more. Just because you can have all the touchpoints and free resources in the world available to your buyer doesn’t mean you should. Too much information or an overly aggressive approach can overwhelm and alienate your buyer if it’s implemented at the wrong stage of the sales process.

Learn the journey they’ve taken, respect the knowledge they already have, and tell them what they need to know - when they need to know it.

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4. Put the buyer’s needs first - even if that means no sale

As any Game of Thrones fan will tell you, a bad ending can be worse than no ending at all. Not every bad lead can be neatly disqualified at the first hurdle - one of the downsides of consultative selling is that the time and money you invest in each prospect doesn’t always bring a return.

If your product is starting to seem like a bad fit, do the right thing and guide your buyer to a better solution. You might not get the sale, but the respectful and authentic approach may pay dividends.