Published on the 17/08/2018 | Written by Heather Wright

Gartner’s latest research into B2B buyer behaviour highlights nearly unnavigable info overload…

Today’s buying journey isn’t just hard, it’s nearly unnavigable without significant help – making the ability to connect customers with the right information, via the right channel, increasingly crucial.

New research from Gartner shows customers not only have an overload of information and options to consider, but have to gain more buy-in internally, leaving them needing the right information, via the right channel more than ever before.

Gartner’s says customers are spending about two-thirds of any B2B buying journey gathering, processing and ‘de-conflicting’ information (with a full 15 percent spent on de-conflicting information alone), most of which is happening without any direct sales rep involvement.

In fact, Gartner says potential customers are spending just 17 percent of their time meeting with suppliers – and that’s suppliers, plural, so if there are three potential suppliers, that’s just over five percent per supplier.

“Today’s buying journey isn’t just hard – it has reached a tipping point where it’s become nearly unnavigable without a significant amount of help,” Adamson, who is Gartner principal executive advisor, says.

“However, customers today don’t really care where that help comes from. A conversation with a sales rep isn’t an end in itself, it’s simply a means to gathering the information necessary to complete specific buying ‘jobs’ [such as identifying the problem, exploring solutions, requirements building and supplier selection].

“What matters isn’t the conversation, it’s the information provided,” Adamson says.

And that information, Gartner says is increasingly coming from digital channels, with 93 percent of customers using digital in the early stages of buying. That number increases to 94 percent in the middle stages and even in the later stages remains high at 83 percent, as buyers go digital to validate information they receive.

Gartner says 27 percent of B2B buying is spent on researching independently, online. (Interestingly, 18 percent is spent researching independently, offline.)

Adamson says the buying process is no longer a case of starting digital and moving to one-on-one interactions, instead digital and one-on-one are running in parallel.

“Just because in-person begins, doesn’t mean online ends,” he says.

And while company websites are the most popular digital channel for customers, Adamson says many are not designed to support buying behaviour, instead being set up as a way of introducing a company, providing ‘the who we are, what we do, and how we help’ information.

“They all seem super straight forward, but this is not the kind of website most of us have built.”

He says sites must give customers an entry point on their own terms, signal solutions in a customers language and help customers do what they’re on the site to do.

“They’re probably not on the site to find the history of your company. There’re there to calculate the cost of taking an action, or the size of a problem and whether it is worth it to address,” Adamson says.