What the heck is going on? Weren’t they the ones who filled out the form? 

Little do you know that they’ve actually long made up their minds. You’re the fourth vendor they’ve called and they’ve already chosen to go with your competitor—they just need to grab some numbers to go back and show their buying committee so they can all feel justified in their choice. 

Before you get upset about this prospect wasting your time, consider what they’ve been through. Research from 6sense finds that the average buying journey takes eleven months, eleven people, and more than 4,300 interactions between the buying team and their vendors. Evaluating just one more vendor adds an average of two more people to the buying committee, twenty-one more days to the process, and twice as many interactions.

The average buying journey now involves 4,000+ interactions between the buying committee and their prospective vendors.

By the time most prospects initiate contact, chances are they’ve already spent months being bombarded with ads, receiving fluffy downloadables that didn’t actually help them (just gave them a lead score), and fending off eager salespeople trying to book meetings before they were ready. 

With all that to contend with, it’s no wonder that today’s business buyers are more impatient and intolerant of nonsense than ever. Just throwing them into a standard email drip campaign and calling it a day isn’t going to work. You have to truly understand where they’re at and reach out with the right message at the right time—reach out too early or overwhelm them with too much content, and you sabotage your chances of winning the deal. 

If we ever hope to win our customers’ business, we’ve got to fix the buyer experience—and fast. And that’s exactly what we’re going to tackle in today’s article. Ready for some hard truths? Let’s dig in. 

You’re not in control of your buyers’ journey—they are

One of the most interesting findings from 6sense’s research is that 82% of the time, buyers were the ones who initiated the first direct contact. Not that their vendors weren’t calling or emailing beforehand, but that buyers just didn’t respond. And if they were part of the 18% who picked up the phone or replied to an email message, chances are it was because they felt ready. “I was just about to reach out,” was a common refrain. 

Buyers don’t want to have direct contact with their vendors until about 70% of the way through their journey.

When do buyers feel ready to initiate this kind of direct contact? According to 6sense’s research, it’s about 70% of the way through their buying journey. By that point, buyers have already done their own research and they have a pretty good idea of who they want to work with—they just want to confirm their choice. In fact, 84% of the time, whichever vendor the buyer reaches out to first is the eventual winner; they’re just talking to their competitors to make sure they’ve done their due diligence. 

84% of the time, the first vendor the buyer reaches out to is the eventual winner.

What this means for marketers is that you have to win the deal before that first sales call—because once your buyer reaches out, their mind is pretty much made up. And you have to do it without initiating direct contact because nothing makes a worse first impression than hounding a buyer before they’re ready. 

Sound like a tall order? Don’t worry, we’ll explain exactly how you can approach this challenge—and come out head and shoulders above your competition—in the section below. 

Focus on education before conversions 

Here’s a controversial statement: Don’t focus so much on pipeline. At least, not at the top of the funnel. 

While we’re all for measuring marketing’s impact on revenue, at the top of the funnel, your focus needs to be on educating your buyers—not necessarily converting them. That isn’t to say you shouldn’t write persuasively about your product, but your focus should be on supplying them with the information they need, not pushing them to immediately fill out a “book a demo” form. 

This looks like anticipating the common questions that your buyers will want to know the answers to. Review past sales calls—what are the 25 or so most common questions that come up about your product? What common pain points trigger your buyers to start looking for a solution? The answers to these questions are your blueprint for the kind of content you need to create, if it doesn’t exist already. 

This is also where your audience research comes in—where does your audience tend to consume content? Are they reading email newsletters on the subway on their way to work? Browsing LinkedIn in the 3pm slump? Bookmarking blog posts to read at night after the kids are in bed? To be effective, you need to understand what kinds of content your audience prefers to consume and how they want to interact with it. You can’t just create what’s easy for you to make, you have to create what your audience wants. That means if you’ve always written blog posts but your audience is mostly on LinkedIn, it’s time to start coaching your executives on how to build a LinkedIn presence and repurpose those blogs into compelling posts. 

This ties into another critical part of educating your buyers: connecting with them on a personal level. We’ve been saying for years that B2B buyers are human beings, not rational economic actors. And new research from dentsu backs this up. Their study shows that when considering a B2B buying decision, buyers now weigh “personal” factors like feeling safe signing a contract or choosing a tool that aligns well with their own personal values over more “objective” ones like price or functionality. If you know your audience, you can start to build this kind of brand affinity with them through your content, before you even get to a sales conversation. 

Do all this right, and they’ll take the initiative to book that demo—when they’re ready. 

Know who’s in the market for your solution

It’s simple math—the fewer accounts your team has to focus on, the better they can focus on those accounts’ needs, and the more efficient your sales process can be. 

But as any marketer knows, this is easier said than done. Tracking marketing qualified leads (MQLs) has never been a satisfying answer because not everyone will fill out a form. Consider that of all the visitors to your website, 97% remain anonymous. And it’s not just casual lookers staying incognito, but your actual buyers too: 6sense found that only 30% of the buying committee ever filled out a form—meaning the vast majority of stakeholders would never have been counted in an MQL score.  

The solution? Using intent data and signals to focus on who is in the market for your solution and making sure you’re targeting them with the right information at the right phase in their journey. Not sure how to do that? Don’t worry, we’ve got an entire blog post on how to make sense of your buyers’ signals and leverage them in your marketing.  

Shift your sales focus

If by the time a buyer reaches out, they’ve pretty much already made up their mind, that leaves open a big question: What’s the role of your business development reps (BDRs/SDRs) now? 

This isn’t us telling you to scuttle your sales team. Far from it! Their role is just as essential, only it’s going to have to look a little different. Before buyers get to that 70% mark (the point in their journey where they decide to reach out to their vendors), it’s all about building connections. BDRs should be focusing on networking, getting on people’s radars, and inviting them to events—not booking demos. By becoming a trusted presence in your buyers’ lives, your BDRs will be top of mind when it comes time to reach out to talk to vendors. 

And when customers do make that call inquiring about getting a demo, BDRs can ask the critical question to figure out whether you were the first vendor they called. If that’s the case, you’re 84% likely to win the deal and you can channel your sales resources accordingly—give them the full white-glove treatment. If you weren’t the first, that means you’re still in the running, but you’re a lot less likely to win. You still want to nurture that account, but prioritize it differently so you can allocate your resources more efficiently. 

Still, even after they initiate contact, your salesperson isn’t going to be invited into those internal meetings where the buying committee is making their final decision. That’s why you need to create a “champion’s kit”—this should include talking points, slides, and content that your champion can share with the other nine members of the buying committee to convince them why your solution is the best. As a marketing team, you can work together with sales to help create this resource. 

Be the respite along their journey

The B2B buying journey is hard, but we have the power to make it a little bit easier. There’s a (possibly apocryphal) story that every Amazon meeting has one empty chair. That chair is supposed to stand in for the customer, because it’s their perspective that matters most—so much so that they’re given a literal seat at the table. 

Modern marketing is all about serving our buyers—using the data and audience research that we have to anticipate their needs, empathize with their experience, and support them along the kind of journey that they want to have. They’re in charge, we’re just guiding them along the way. The more we can rationalize the signals they give us to create personalized buyer experiences, tailored exactly to their needs, the more likely we are to win. 

So pat that empty chair on the way out, because it’s the most important voice in the room.