067. The Evolution of the B2B Buyer Journey

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Hello there. Welcome to another episode of Boundifies Demand Gen Studio. My name is Miranda Jenkins and I'm joined with Emilio Garcia. How's it going Emilio?

Hey Miranda, how are you? It has been a while.

Yeah, a while since our just you and I sitting down working about a topic.

We don't get me wrong, we love our guests, but it's obviously a different experience because we are very worried about the whole setup and all that. So it is awesome to just be the two of us and talk about some hopefully interesting topics for B2B marketers out there.

Yeah, awesome. Well, today we're going to be talking through the evolution of the B2B buying journey. So we're going to be talking about just how the B2B buying journey has evolved over the years and then talk through a little bit about why it matters to both marketing and sales teams. We know that buyers are more informed and empowered than ever, which requires us marketers to be on our game and try to be one step ahead. So to kick things off, the B2B buying journey is the process that businesses go through when purchasing their products or services from other businesses. And unlike B2C purchases, the B2B buying journey usually involves multiple stakeholders, typically a longer sales cycle and just overall a more complex decision making process. And the journey typically consists of the following stages. So you have the awareness stage where the buyer recognizes that they have a problem or an opportunity that needs to be addressed and then they begin researching possible solutions. Often they start consuming educational content to learn more about the potential solutions there are to their problem. And then next they move into the consideration stage where they have clearly defined their problem and they start evaluating the different solutions that they've discovered to solve it. And at this stage they start comparing different vendors and maybe they start exploring the case studies that those vendors have and they start asking their peers for recommendation solutions to their problem. Then they move into the decision stage where they've selected a solution and they start finalizing their purchase decision. And that usually involves starting the negotiation process, signing contracts, seeking internal approval with their internal stakeholders, all that then implementation and onboarding where they've made the purchase and they start integrating the solution into their business and start using it. And then post purchase, which is where the buyer starts evaluating their decisions, effectiveness and if they made the right decision and the seller is really focusing on customer support and training and then having ongoing engagement to hopefully retain the customer. So by really understanding the journey that your buyers are going through, it allows marketers and sales teams alike to start to you know, think through their strategies and make sure that their strategies are lining up with how their buyers are actually researching, evaluating and making their purchase decision decisions. So to kick things off, Emilio, can you walk us through what the old B2B buying journ looked like let's say maybe 10 years ago?

Yes. And I want, I want to roll back as you know, right? I, I like to get philosophical about some on the why, why is it important to understand how that buyer journey has evolved? Why is is relevant to business owners, to executive decision makers at, at companies, especially B2B brands. The philosophical part I think is that we are as humans, we are usually in the self mode all the time, right? We, we care a lot about the world the way that we see it, right? Our own perception of things. And I think brands do the same, companies do the same, right? They care about how they are perceived and they, they use this lens to filter the world the way that they see it. So for example, the problem with the buying, the buying habits of your target market is that usually your internal processes are not built for them, they're built for you, right? It's like that for your own internal process. If you look at, if you're a business owner, a decision maker, an executive at sales and you look at your pipeline and look at the stages, do they say things about your buyer process to acquire your product or do they say the process that your company follows and therefore your view of progress is what the sales rep says he has done. So I think that's the biggest issue that when we create processes for client facing activities like sales just with the lens of the company and not with the lens of the customer, the buyer, we run the risk of creating something that doesn't align with the way that they purchase. That's the biggest issue, right? And technology has especially bad thing for, for people that are centered on themselves rather than customers. And you can shoot on, on, on the wrong direction in two ways. One is I'm going to use here AI as an example because I've seen some comments about it that I find very good or remarkable is we get super excited about the possibilities. Let's say, you know, now with AI we will be able to support our clients this way and to you know, answer automations and create a way for them, an environment for them so they can, we can reduce friction for our buyers. But the question is are they are your customers in the edge of technology? As maybe a marketer or someone that is working at technology is probably not, right? The biggest problems right now around a lot of buying processes and a lot of processes in general for customer success is that the buyer is not comfortable with the edge technology that we are developing. Right. Some people still like to talk on the phone and just talked in person. And while not everybody does, the level of adoption is not, is not equal. Right. A handful of people are in chat GPT compared to the rest of the world. Most, most of the. Of the rest of the world. It's not that they don't know about it, it's that they don't care enough to use it. So there's this edge on technology that you might be ahead of your buyers but at the same time your company or your, your representatives might be behind how your buyers do things. And so that's the context for why understanding that buyer journey. It's important. It's personalized. Right. Is not. I'm not going to say that every single person had changed how they buy in the last 10 or 20 years depends on where you are, depends on how old are you, how eager are you to adopt technology. But I can say confidently that for most of us it had change. If you are a sales rep or a sales executive or a CEO that doesn't have a critical view at is my sales process that has adapted to the way that the modern buyer buys. You might be losing opportunities without even knowing because you are not aware of those changes. So that's why it's so important to understand how that journey have changed. I don't know if you relate to that.

Yeah. Acknowledging that this is something that we spend eight hours a day, 40 hours a week thinking. Well, whereas our buyers are not who have their own industries, they have their own, you know, their, their minds are thinking about other things during those 40.

Hours you want to start understanding has their buying habits changed the same way that our company have changed. And so again, most of the time is that your buyers are ahead of you most of the time. But not always. The point is you want to align them so with that context in mind. Yes. The Internet have changed a lot of things. And what have changed the most is the buyer's perspective. The seller is trying to catch up. And the reason is because 10, 20 years ago when, when there was no access to so much information as we have right now, the only way to get knowledge about a product or an offering was to actually talk to someone, usually someone from the company that was selling the product or the service because the information from other buyers was limited by reach. Right. It wasn't that there weren't any knowledgeable buyers is that if you look around on your, on your real world network or social network, probably you didn't know any other buyer, qualified buyer, especially in B2B, that's, that's very probable. If you're buying a car, you might know someone, a family member or a friend that have experienced the same brand that you are thinking of and you can ask what do you think about the car, the maintenance costs and all that. But for, for B2B products is, is less common and obviously you will have to have a great relationship with that person to ask and you know them sharing that with you. But the Internet changed that. People can share and do a comment or an opinion or review about a product or service and they share with the world and you just need one person and usually you don't get one, you get a handful. So that changed the dynamic on the buying process for the buyer because now we invest a ton of time researching or being aware about brands before even talking to a salesperson. That's one key difference.

Yeah, yeah. The peer, the peers that we're, you know, reaching out to for their opinion are more like Reddit threads now. And like, you know, the, what are they called? Like the customer like database where you can go, I did it when I was looking at buying my new car and it's like where all of the Kia owners go and put their, you know, opinions of each model.

Yeah. So that, that is important because your, your past seller was the gatekeeper of the information. So the moment that that person will reach out to a sales rep, they had little information. And now that's completely different. I remember there's this statistic that most buyers nowadays, obviously again depends on the industry and the kind of product and all that. But they have already went through their own research and understanding of the product and their strengths and weakness. Maybe 70, 80% of the, of the journey they have already figured out on their own. And by the time they ask the rep, usually they know, not always, but they know a lot about the product themselves. And they don't need to be educated on it by the seller or by the sales rep. They just want to explore the options and the price, you know, details on pricing and some other things. So when you start engaging that, that that already happened. And so the impact for brands is are you being part of that journey for your buyers? Right. Are you being part of the brands that the buyer get exposed to when they are doing that research, when they're asking around, are you knowledgeable of what is the opinion that search engines, AI agents, humans have about what you offer. Because if you don't have an inkling of that, then again, probably you are. The moment that you have a conversation with the buyer, you are at the bottom of that list. You're a checklist on. On their, on their. On their list at the bottom. And your chances of winning are very slow. And your sales team will. Will consider the. The lost due to other factors. Right. Due to the sales process itself. I didn't, you know, follow up and fast enough. I didn't try hard enough when in reality it was all about the trust that your brand had already. And as you were saying, Miranda, that changes the way that marketing should look like at, you know, the efforts that we do online especially, and also in the real world.

Yeah, I feel like there's been a big shift of it. Just thinking about the selling process Even outside of B2B, like you think about your typical car salesman, it's just become so much more buyer focused. Selling focused. And I feel like there's more similarities in the way you think about it with the B2B process compared to the B2C than there used to be. Because, yes, you're selling to a company and usually a, you know, a buying committee and not one person, but because it's so much more buyer focused, you are kind of pulling on the heartstrings more like making sure that the person humanizing it more. You're making sure that the person is. Knows that you understand where you're. Where they're at, where they're coming from, what they're struggling with, how you can provide a solution. And I just, I feel like it's more noticeable when a brand is out of touch with that and you get, you know, content from the brand that just doesn't speak to where you're at.

Yeah. And so I think that's one big difference. How do you adapt to presenting yourself as the buyer? You know, goes along and discover your brand and some other brands and what perceptions they build. And I like this concept that in B2B, the adjustment that the buying committee does is based on risk. Right. So you will present yourself in the marketplace as who you have a perception of value. Right. I have certain amount of offerings in exchange for certain price. But you have to add on top of that how risky you are as a choice. And that includes the total cost for the buyer of your solution, not just your price. I will have to change providers or I will have to change processes internally. And that will require some political capital to Move the organization and take the step. Am I risking my own profession, professional career here if I make this choice? That's part of your buyer on the B2B side. So you want to have a good understanding of that. I think that's one key change on how, you know, what that changed in the last 10, 20 years. The other big one, again, something that we need to strike a great balance as decision makers is the channels and the. And how synchronous is the communication, right? So 20 years ago, you have a small amount of channels, and most of them were synchronous, right? You needed both the buyer and the seller at the same time to have a conversation. So you had. I know that for B2B has never been in store, but at least in person conversations, right? A meeting in person, that will be something like a channel for talking about your products and services, obviously phones and maybe some. Some messages where, you know, something relevant that you. You could use. And you look forward 20 years and the number of channels that you can talk to your potential prospects has exploded, right, In a way that, you know, is so hard to keep up. You have email, you have your web chat, you have your forms, you have every single social media that your buyers interact to. And again, you, as a seller might say, what works for me is having one or two channels, because that way I can be very efficient and, you know, really process those requests in a way that works for us. And that's fine, right? You want to have an efficient process for sure. But. But at the same time, we have to recognize that we as buyers, even if we are B2B buyers, we live in this multichannel world where we want to get answers asynchronously, right? Sometimes is. Sometimes we want it, and in that moment, sometimes we can wait. And sometimes we want to do it over email. Sometimes it's going to be over a chat. So what is your company doing to adapt your sales experience to that? Because I like this other idea or concept that the job of marketing is to increase mental availability, which is the perception of the brand itself, what you will call branding. But the other big job is to make sure that we have great physical. Right. And it can be virtual, but physical availability, right. When someone is willing to. Or is interest in the category that I offer, am I. Am I available as a brand? Right? And that means, you know, in the real world, B2C example is when you walk down the aisle for coffee, you want to have your brand there for sure, because if not, you lost the opportunity. Well, the equivalent of that in the virtual world is that if they think about your category and they start searching for it, whatever happens digitally, you want to increase the chances that they find you. And part of that availability is able to, you know, start a conversation, have some answers. So that's the other big issue that it's a, again a double edged sword. One, you don't have enough channels. Second, you have the channels but you don't put the resources behind it to support them. Right. You Open up your LinkedIn page, but if someone reach out there, nobody answers back. Right. Or you put your chair inbox email on your website and someone sends you an email and goes nowhere. So I think there's, you gotta strike a balance as an organization to adapt and to the answer of well, there are 20 potential channels that we can have. How do I choose the ones that make sense? I think that hopefully our listeners can see here that, that it depends answer depends on the buying habits of your buyers. You have to ask them. There's just so many resources that you can do on your own without asking your buyers. You know, the steps that they take in their journey. How do they typically start thinking about product like you, like the one that you sell? Where do they spend time digitally? And finally, right. What are the channels or ways that they like to be either reach out to or when they have a question that they use and test. Right. Set up a channel and try it out, see if there's any response and be mindful of the ones that you want to truly support and the ones that you are not going to support ideally don't have them. Right. Well, I don't know if you have experienced that, that you know that a company has a, a way of communicating with you in theory, but when you reach out, nothing happens.

Yeah, definitely. Or I think it's also when a company, on the flip side, when a company has no way to actually speak to a human being, it also can be a little bit off putting. You're like, how interested are you in, you know, making this connection with me?

Yeah.

So let's talk a little bit more about what the modern buyer journey looks like. We know that buyers are more informed and that they're expecting this seamless personalized experience. What can marketers today do to help meet them where they are in the modern journey?

Yeah, well, again, I think you gotta orchestrate the way that you go to the market, right. With the thinking that is a multi channel approach that your buyers might be searching for information or asking around in different places. And again, I know that Businesses and brands have limited resources always, so you have to optimize their use. And the way that you choose those channels is the one by one. That's my typical recommendation, right. Test one and see what happens and then expand to the next once you dominated or you saturated. But the priority should come from whatever research you can do on your audience and asking your potential buyers. I think that for how do you present yourself? How do you increase your mental availability? That will be the approach for the physical availability. I don't want to stress that it's only about technology, but typically it's harder to orchestrate if you don't have a technical foundation or technological foundation there. I think having a place like a CRM to hold the conversations that you have across the buyer journey is super, super important. Right. Again, the other disconnect that happens is that from the company perspective, the people that take care of talking about the company to the, to the outside world is a different department or group of people from the ones that take care of customer requests or prospects requests, which is sales. And it's a different department or group of people from the one to take care of current or past customers. And so because from a company perspective the individuals in those groups are different, then we typically set up technology and processes that are separated or isolated from each other and they don't engage too much among themselves. But from the buyer perspective, they are just dealing with one single thing is one company. And they expect. We are used to the fact that especially in the B2C world, companies already know a lot about us. Right. Is that, you know, I use Amazon as an example. Amazon knows in one single entity what are you interested on what you have already purchased. And if you, if you, if you want to complain or do something or something that you bought, there's a dedicated experience for you and there's no human behind that.

Right.

The system knows you. And so I'm, I, I'm sure that the parallel cannot be, you know, extended to B2B quite exactly, but that's a good idea about where you want to go today. I will, I'm going to use Tesla here. You can buy a car with Apple pay. Why so hard to buy other things, you know, that are not a car digitally? So that's the idea is, are the channels that we offer for educating, taking care of prospects and taking care of them connected in a way that our buyer feels that it doesn't matter if he's talking to marketing or he's talking to sales or customer success, they're talking to one entity. And that requires that technological foundation, which is the CRM. Again, unfortunately, it's not just the CRM. You have to support it with processes and people have to feel that they have that shared responsibility, that the responsibility is to take care of the buyer journey and not just of their turf. Right. Their department mission.

You reminded me of another question you mentioned about the doing buyer interviews and like finding out more about your buyers. In your experience, what's the best, like most successful way that a marketer can go go about doing that, like platforms or tactics?

Yes, it is. I know it's a hard because I hear it all the time. Right. And probably our listeners have heard it as well. Right. You just go talk to buyers. But we have a big restriction, which is we don't typically have access to buyers. We have access to potential buyers. The first thing is, yes, I acknowledge that it's not an easy thing to do. Some ideas. Make friends with some sales reps and ask them to tag you along on sales conversations. Right. That's a great moment to do so. Especially the sales rep is in charge of accounts buy recurrently. You can say, well, you have a great relationship with the point of contact. Can I tack along on your next conversation, you know, zoom or in real person one and just insert through the conversation the questions about how is it that you bought from us? So I think that's the because again, what you want to understand on those interviews and nowadays obviously you can ask chatgpt about what kind of questions you can ask, but you want to understand how do you took the decision, what made you choose us instead of something else or someone else. So that will be a way. Right. The other one obviously is that you just like start cold calling, which is very challenging and ask, you know, for prospective buyers and say, I have no intention of selling you anything. This is not a sales conversation. I want to learn more about your buying habits with some incentives, maybe. And the other big, big advice is that ideally you don't talk only to happy current customers, but you also talked with lost opportunities and with people that have even thought about buying from you because you want to get a broader picture, right. Of the ones that didn't choose you. Why right? Is, is it the offer, is it the value, is it the risk perception of the brand? So I think that that's, that's a recommendation. I wouldn't say, Miranda, that you shouldn't start anything if you don't have that information. We have done it and I, I, I know that for a lot of Business owners, especially smaller brands. It's not necessarily feasible, but it's highly, highly recommendable.

All right, I would love to hear your take on your future predictions. What you think is next for B2B buying with, you know, the emergence of AI and all that.

Yeah, again, that's, that's a tricky one. Right. Is I love to eventually hear back what I said five years ago. Yeah. And see what, what came true. I, honestly, I don't know, but I, I'm gonna draw from this comment from Jeff Bezos about that he likes the idea of instead of focusing what's gonna change? Focusing what's not going to change. I like that concept. Right. Is that what will stay true in five, 10 years? I think he used a couple of examples. He says, you know, what will not change is that everybody wants to buy at the lowest price. For example, nobody wants to buy, you know, more expensive things than they should, and that's not gonna change in 10 to five years. And the other thing is that nobody wants, nobody wants to buy, you know, with more friction or more complicated. Everyone was easy. Right. As easy as possible. And that has been a guiding principle for Amazon in terms of, you know, how they, they present their product and their offerings. So I think for us, for B2B brands, we can extend that idea that we, I, I think buyers will continue to appreciate value mitigation about the, the products or the services they, they buy to B2B. And yeah, less friction. So how that will map out in the technology will be a combination of how the buyers adopt the different technologies and how the, the brands adopt the technologies as well. I, I think that as much as I feel that AI is going to have meaningful changes across a lot of domains, that we will see something similar to digitalization efforts in general, that it takes time, that industries will adopt it at different rates, and that it is okay if you are not at the edge of the adoption because what matter is, what is the adoption level of your buyers? Right. And obviously you as a company push forward to, you know, be at the edge of their own comfort zone, but not too much that you get disconnected from their reality.

Yeah, that's good. That reminds me of something one of my college professors said for marketing classes. But, like, they can get in the weeds and tell you the, you know, ins and outs of how to perform the tasks in class right now, but likely when you graduate in four years, it's going to be outdated. Things are going to, you know, things will have changed. And so the best they can do is really help you form a solid foundation of marketing principles and the things that aren't going to change that then, you know, when you get out in the workforce and you start learning the ins and outs of the platform you do to perform the tasks and all that, you have that solid base of fundamental marketing to inform your decisions.

Yes, yes, because. And that's something that took me a long time to realize. Right. But yeah. Has principles, they're not immutable, but they change at a way slower speed than the technology or the channels that we use to implement them. Right. So if we have a great foundation of those principles, we will be prepared for whatever changes happen on the technology and the mediums where we go and make something out of that.

Yeah. It's so tied to human nature.

Yes. Yeah. Because our brains are still in the same.

Yes.

It changes very slowly. So. Yeah.

Awesome. Well, in closing, do you have any laughs, like takeaway practical tips for new marketers and how they should go about, you know, implementing their, the buying journey into their strategies?

No. Love it. Hopefully I got you thinking today about auditing. Right. If I want to use that word. What is your current mapping of your buyer journey in your, in your processes, in your website, in the ways that you engage digitally with your prospect, prospects and buyer and customers? Right. Is look at your pipeline, the definition of the stages? Look at your website, the way that you offer or what channels you offer for your prospective buyers to reach out to you. Look at the volume of them and your, your time to response, is it appropriate? Does it make sense? And obviously talk to your, to your buyers in whatever way you can. Even six, ten conversations will make a tremendous difference. So those will be my, my main recommendations.

Awesome. Well, thanks so much for joining today everyone and we will see you next time in our next episode. Until then, you can find all of our other episodes, including all the rest, you know, the other demand generation topics and then our interviews with other marketing professionals on our demand Gen Studio page. Thanks, Emilio.

Thank you, Miranda. Check them out. Bye Bye.