The marketing model currently used by most B2B companies has significant flaws, and most of the tactics used to improve B2B marketing performance have been only modestly successful. What’s really needed is a different paradigm of B2B marketing, one that is grounded in a clear, evidence-based understanding of how business buyers actually make purchase decisions.
Embracing a new marketing model will be difficult for some B2B marketers. To understand why, consider the following thought experiment.
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Suppose you’ve recently been hired to be the CMO of a B2B company, and you’ve been tasked to reinvigorate the company’s marketing efforts. Through market research, you’ve identified several attributes of the potential buyers in your company’s target market.
Most of your company’s potential buyers are not actively evaluating products or services like your company offers at any given time.
A trigger of some kind is almost always required to motivate the potential buyers to begin a buying process. In this context, a trigger is an event that causes a potential buyer to feel a need or desire to fix a problem or seize an opportunity.
Except in rare cases, marketing messages or content alone will not cause potential buyers to begin a buying process.
When a trigger event occurs, most of your company’s potential buyers quickly create a mental list of companies, products, or services that they believe are worth considering, i.e. an initial consideration set.
This initial consideration set is created before most potential buyers have conducted any research and is based on the mental impressions they’ve formed from a variety of touchpoints, such as their past experiences with companies, products or services, marketing messages, news reports, and conversations with colleagues and friends.
Almost all of your company’s potential buyers make almost all of their purchases from companies that were in their initial consideration set.
Given these buyer attributes, what marketing strategy would you use?
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The buyer decision-making attributes described in this thought experiment make two strategic decisions rather clear. First, it would make no sense to emphasize marketing programs designed to persuade potential buyers to initiate a buying process because such programs would be largely ineffective.
Second, it’s clear that a primary focus of your marketing strategy should be to increase the likelihood that your company will be included in the initial consideration sets of as many potential buyers as possible because that greatly increases your odds of success.
These strategies differ significantly from what most B2B companies are currently doing. Today, most spend a lot of money on marketing programs designed to entice potential buyers to start a buying process, while they spend far less on programs to get their company into buyer initial consideration sets.
This disconnect is important because research has shown that the buyer decision-making patterns used in our thought experiment accurately describe how many business buyers actually make purchase decisions.
What Really Triggers a Buying Process?
For example, in a 2021 survey of business decision-makers by WSJ Intelligence and B2B International, researchers asked survey participants what kinds of events triggered their decision to search for a new vendor/solution provider. The following table shows the percentage of respondents who selected each of 12 trigger events.
These survey results illustrate that a wide variety of events can trigger a B2B buying process, but they also show that events involving the consumption of marketing/sales/news content (shown in red in the table) won’t be sufficient to trigger a buying process in most cases.
Why Being On the “Day-One List” Matters
Research has also confirmed the importance of being included in a potential buyer’s initial consideration set.
In 2022, Bain & Co. and Goggle surveyed 1,208 people at U.S. companies who had been involved in buying several kinds of business products and services. From 80% to 90% of the respondents said they had a set of vendors in mind before they did any research. And 90% of those respondents said they ultimately chose a vendor that was on their day-one list.
The military concept of “decisive point” is a good analogy for the role and importance of the initial consideration set. A decisive point in a military operation is “a geographic place, key event, critical factor, or function that, when acted on, allows commanders to gain a marked advantage over an adversary on contribute materially to achieving success.” [Joint Publication 5-0, Joint Operation Planning (Washington, D.C.: U.S. GPO, 2011), GL-8.]
Being included in a potential buyer’s initial consideration set is a decisive point in B2B marketing because companies that are in the initial consideration set have a significant advantage over those that aren’t.
Two Critical Changes
The findings of these research studies (and others) make it clear that we need to change some long-standing and widely-held beliefs about how B2B marketing can effectively drive strategic business outcomes.
First, we need to recognize that marketing’s ability to persuade potential buyers to begin a serious buying process is limited at best.
And second, we need to focus more of our efforts on ensuring that our company is included in our potential buyers’ initial consideration sets. After all, you’ve got to be invited to the party before you can be asked to dance.
Top image courtesy of R/DV/RS via Flickr (CC).
