What is she doing before she contacts the salesperson? She's conducting pre-purchase research - getting recommendations from trusted colleages, using search engine queries to educate herself on potential solutions and reading blogs and social media posts to understand her options. If you're not connecting with these buyers in the research stage, you won't get an opportunity to compete for her business. That's why it's so vitally important for B2B sellers to have an active inbound marketing program.
Source: Corporate Executive Board - New Decision Timeline
The continuing stagnant economic situation has led B2B buyers to become more risk-averse. Risk-averse buyers seek a broad consensus amongst stakeholders in the purchasing decision. They take more time to reach that consensus as well. It's important for B2B sellers to adopt tactics that minimize the perceived risk of doing business with them. You also need to be consistently persistent and cultivate relationships with all of the stakeholders in the buying process. It takes time and effort to uncover the buying influences. Miller-Heiman's Strategic Sellling Process describes 4 buying influences in a complex sale:
The bottom line is that selling is becoming more complex. Your sales efforts and content marketing must address the needs of all of the buying influences at your target prospect.
Source: Sirius Decisions
This research confirms the CEB research mentioned above. B2B sellers need to produce content that addresses all phases of the buying process - from awareness to consideration to decision-making. How well do you think you will do if you're not producing any content?
Source: Act-On
Inbound lead generation delivers 54% more leads into the sales funnel than traditional outbound lead generation tactics. And inbound leads are cheaper - inbound marketers spending more than $25K per year save an average of 13% in overall cost per lead. These statistics reflect the fact that inbound marketing syncs with the modern buying process. They also create a compelling case for companies not generating inbound leads to get on the train or get run over by it.
Source: HubSpot 2013 State of Inbound Marketing
Your sales process needs to reflect this fact and use lead nurturing, lead scoring and email marketing to determine which leads are qualified and help move them through your sales pipeline. Marketing automation helps you provide the right content at the right time as leads move through the pipeline and measures results so that you can iterate and optimize your marketing automation process. A robust internet marketing software platform like HubSpot is a prerequisite to effective marketing automation.
Source: Gleanster - Measuring The Impact of Lead Nurturing On The Sales Pipeline
These statistics should help shed light on how the modern B2B company is buying solutions in the post-recession economy. If you're not adapting your sales process to reflect these realities, you have a tough row to hoe. If you use inbound marketing to match your customers' buying process, you'll be well-poised to grow in a challenging economy. If you're interested in learning more, please schedule a free consultation.