NOTE: This post originally appeared on the Intent Data publication on Medium.
Have you downloaded and read DemandGen Report’s 2019 B2B Buyers Survey Report yet? It’s sponsored by Demandbase and available for download here.
Here are some key takeaways on buyer behavior.
Buyers Are Ready to Learn from Good Salespeople & Content
- 33% accepted outreach from vendors for calls and demos in the first month (vs. 23% just a year ago) and 70% within the first three months.
- 97% said that sales reps who demonstrated a stronger knowledge of their needs was important to them. (66% went further and said it was VERY important.)
- 79% said the winning vendor’s content had a significant impact on their buying decision.
- 56% differentiated between vendors based on the sales team’s ability to demonstrate knowledge of the buyer’s company.
- 95% said it was important that the vendor’s sales team had more insights about their company and NEEDS (55% said VERY important.)
Paid Ads Work (and help)
- 68% said they notice ads from the solution provider they chose, and 37% said those ads favorably impacted their view of the company.
Moving Quickly to Pricing
- 25% solicited pricing info from a list of vendors in under one month.
Buying Teams are Swelling…and Cycles are Lengthening
- 32% involved others in the buying team within the first month.
- 57% say their buying cycle is longer, on average than a year ago.
- 56% have 4 or more people involved in the purchasing process.
Translating Observations to Action with Intent Data
Great research like this can yield important insights. The chasm to cross, however, is to appropriately incorporate them into our revenue growth approach.
Contact Level™ Intent Data provides significant flexibility to leverage these insights.
Prepared Professor
Buyers are ready to learn from great sales people and content….but too often the lesson plans are based on the product/service rather than the prospect’s priorities. After all, there’s no real way to know the problem a buyer is working on solving. Except there is. And that has powerful implications.
- As more buyers are open to outreach, it’s important to understand who to target. Account-level intent data can identify corporate interest, but outreach has to target active people. That takes more than job titles. It takes knowledge of who’s taking action indicating engagement.
- Matthew Dixon & Brent Adamson’s The Challenger Sale builds on the power of a sales person’s understanding of common challenges a buyer faces. Content level intent data can take it a step further by identifying the specific issue a buyer is engaged around. (Note that this requires the context from a bespoke algorithm vs. “topics” with opaque taxonomy.) That info addresses several of the survey findings. It helps reps demonstrate knowledge of the buyer’s needs (at least perceived) and the buyer’s company, it enables the sales team to put the optimal enablement content in front of prospects to help them with their priorities, and it helps connect with the 95% of buyers who want reps to understand their needs.
Broad Remarketing
Paid ads work. Putting them in front of the right audiences is a challenge. Contact level intent data enables companies to create custom audiences for remarketing on platforms including Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google. The remarketing can be targeted based on the competitor with whom prospects have interacted, the details of the challenge they’re trying to solve, role/title, stage in buying journey, industry, etc.
Know Who’s Engaged with Competitors
Buyers are moving quickly to pricing and RFPs. That means the window to attract their attention organically, or stumble across them with serendipitous outbound sales is shorter. It’s more critical to know who is actively engaged with competitors. Contact level intent data provides those signals.
More People, More Agendas, More Deals Lost to Status Quo
As buying teams expand and buying cycles lengthen, the status quo is rapidly becoming the key competitor to many B2B sales teams.
It’s relatively easy to identify deal champions and putative decision-makers, but understanding the roles, titles, priorities, and agendas involved is nearly impossible.
Contact level intent data can help. By identifying the actual people taking action, and alerting the sales rep to signals from accounts with pending deals, it’s possible to identify conflicting initiatives, additional players and competitive engagement.
Right People, Right Time, Right Message
“83% of buyers report that they often accelerate or put purchase decisions on hold based on their business’ changing needs and priorities.”
DemandGen Report’s conclusion, therefore, is that “vendors have to ensure they are positioned to help accelerate that decision as much as possible.”
That’s the allure of purchase intent data. It’s also where typical account-level data stumbles. These fast-moving, multi-party buying decisions require granular, contact level detail to obtain the critical insights necessary to be in front of the right people, at the right time, with the message that will be meaningful AND HELPFUL to them.
That’s the key to accelerating complex buying decisions.
PSA
(DemandGen Report’s John Dering and Andrew Gaffney will dig into the report in more detail during a webinar on 15 July 2019. More info here if you’re interested.)
