Episode 96: What changed in the B2B buying process with Adam Goyette and Sam Senior

Full-Funnel B2B Marketing Show

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​Join me, Adam Goyette and Sam Senior to discuss:
​The insights they've collected about the B2B buyer journey at G2 and Testbox
​The friction points that make sales cycles longer, and how to eliminate them
​How leading B2B tech companies adapt their sales and marketing processes to the way their buyers are buying.
The B2B buying process has become longer and more complicated, but you can still shorten it. Here is why and how.
1. UNNECESSARY FRICTION POINTS IN THE BUYING PROCESS
When B2B buyers arrive at the website, they are already in half of their buying process.
They want to see WITHOUT talking to SDRs:
- What does your product and what makes it different
- Industry use cases
- Price
- Product overview or get a self-trial
Too many B2B companies are afraid to share this information, pushing buyers to book demo calls. As a result, they deal with:
- No show-ups and ghosting leads
- Long sales cycles
2. LACK OF BUYER ENABLEMENT.
Even if your Champion is super excited about your product, they still need to get budget approval and sell it in-house to other members of the buying committee.
During this process, they will get dozens of questions about:
- Budget justification and ROI
- Vertical use cases and results
- Migration, security and onboarding, etc
If you are not armoring your Champion with the content to address these questions, sales cycle automatically becomes longer.
3. LOW BRAND RECOGNITION.
Again, even if your Champion is super excited, but other buying committee members have never heard about your product, the sales cycle extends.
Nobody wants to risk.
4. UNQUALIFIED SALES REPS.
When talking to sales reps, B2B buyers expect to get comprehensive answers to their questions, not going through BANT qualification and boring demo and then being followed up by junior SDR.
We are not in the "Wolf from Wall Street" movie. Sales reps are consultants first, sellers - second.
HOW TO INFLUENCE AND SHORTEN THE BUYING PROCESS
- Make your marketing message clear and tailored to a specific ICP.
- Target the buying committee group with 4 demand programs:
- Paid content distribution
- Social engagement and thought leadership
- Events
- Content collaboration
- Join and engage with the communities where your buyers ask for recommendations or learn about new products
- Show product price or at least give an estimate.
- If due to product complexity, you can't give product trials, create a sandbox environment or, at least, record product tours to give a comprehensive product functionality overview
- Share detailed vertical use cases
- Consistently update FAQ based on the conversations with your buyers
- Prepare a buyer enablement program to help your Champions to sell your product inhouse
- Make sure everybody in your company who talks to customers knows your product well and understands ICP's typical use cases, goals, needs, and challenges