One of the most profound developments in B2B marketing of the last quarter century has been the emergence of empowered and independent business buyers.
The proliferation of readily available online information has been the driving force behind the increased power of business buyers. Easy access to a wealth of information about almost any conceivable topic has enabled business decision-makers to find most of the information they want or need on their terms. And now, artificial intelligence is making it even easier for buyers to access information.
Information abundance has fundamentally changed how business buyers engage with potential vendors and how they make buying decisions. Overall, B2B marketers have done a reasonably good job of adapting their methods and practices to address most of these changes.
However, there is growing evidence of an important change in B2B buyer behavior that marketers have only recently begun to appreciate and focus on.
A Flawed Model of B2B Buyer Behavior
For most of the past twenty-five years, the accepted paradigm of B2B buying has assumed that a buying process begins when a company’s leaders or managers recognize that a need or problem exists and decide to address the issue in some way.
These “buyers” then gather information about the need or problem, evaluate the available options, and may or may not decide to purchase a product or service to address the situation. So, the conventional paradigm of B2B buying behavior holds that most information gathering and buyer “learning” occurs after an intentional buying process has started.
Several recent research studies have shown that this widely-accepted paradigm is not accurate in many instances.
The 2025 B2B Buyer Experience Report by 6sense describes one of the most recent studies regarding B2B buyer behavior. This study consisted of two surveys of business buyers that together generated nearly 4,800 responses. The survey respondents were located in North America (46%), Continental Europe (20%), Asia-Pacific (14%), and the UK and Ireland (20%).
The respondents to the 6sense surveys evaluated an average of five vendors per purchase, and they filled four spots on their vendor shortlist at the very start (“Day One”) of their buying process. They also said they purchased from one of the four vendors on their Day One shortlist 95% of the time. In addition, 97% of the respondents said they had prior experience with at least one of the vendors on their Day One shortlist.
Earlier studies have produced similar findings. For example, in a 2022 survey of business buyers by Bain & Co. and Google, 80% – 90% of the respondents said they had a set of vendors in mind before they did any research, and 90% of the respondents said they ultimately chose a vendor that was in their initial consideration set.
A 2021 survey of business buyers by WSJ Intelligence and B2B International also illustrated the importance of the vendor preferences that B2B buyers bring into a buying process.
In this study, the survey contained several questions about a recent purchase and asked the participants to reflect on the vendor they ultimately selected (the “winning vendor”) and on a vendor they considered but did not select (the “losing vendor”).
The researchers divided the purchase journey into three stages and defined the “Pre-Decision stage” as “. . . the time between when they had selected a supplier (for a given product/service category) and when the ‘trigger’ occurred that prompted them to actively begin searching for and deciding on a new supplier.”
The survey findings revealed that the mental impressions of vendors held by buyers during the Pre-Decision stage exerted significant influence on purchase decisions. For example, survey respondents were more then twice as likely to say they were very familiar with the winning vendor versus the losing vendor before their active buying process began. Respondents also said that during the Pre-Decision stage, they had a higher level of pre-existing trust and confidence in the winning vendor than in the losing vendor.
Enter Opportunistic Learning
These results clearly demonstrate that most business buyers do not begin a buying process with a “blank slate.” In fact, most buyers bring strong opinions about vendors to the process.
These pre-existing opinions develop because information has become so abundant and readily available that business people are routinely consuming information about business issues long before they have formed anything close to “buying intent” or started an intentional buying process.
I call this type of information consumption opportunistic learning, and it occurs because humans are naturally programmed to seek rewards. We all have a mental radar system that is constantly scanning our environment to identify reward opportunities.
In a business setting, our radar system is always scanning our environment to identify information that may help us improve our company’s performance and/or advance our career.
Opportunistic learning has important implications for B2B marketing, and some marketers have started to recognize its significance. The research findings discussed above show that reaching opportunistic learners is important because the impressions they form during opportunistic learning remain influential when they become involved in a buying process.
Making an impact on opportunistic learners requires marketers to use a particular approach to marketing messaging, and in my next post, I’ll discuss the kind of messaging that’s needed to connect with opportunistic learners.
Image courtesy of onewaystock.com via Flckr (CC).
