The nature of the B2B buyer is fundamentally changing.  And the impact will forever re-align the roles of sales and marketing team members.  This underlies the topic I am going to be covering in my presentation and panel on Thursday at the DMA’s B2B engagement marketing event in London.

It’s also a topic at the core of much dialogue right now among B2B sales and marketing professionals in the marketplace.  So it’s worth digging into the dynamics.

How is the nature of the B2B buyer changing?  And what is the evidence?

At the most fundamental level, we’re seeing a power shift — from B2B vendor to B2B buyer — that is largely fuelled by the proliferation of Internet-available information.  Initially, this information availability benefitted vendors more than buyers, but the explosion of the Web as a forum for buyer social exchange and micro-publishing has overwhelmed vendors.  What has emerged is an asynchronous acceleration of power on the buyer side.

This is probably not new to you, but some of the more granular aspects of this evolution may not be as apparent.  In particular, this power shift has several consequences, as I outlined in a recent post on my Propelling Brands blog. 

B2B buyers:

• Are increasingly turning to online sources, earlier in their process, to research purchases before ever calling a ‘live’ sales rep;

• Are increasingly leveraging social media — especially peer communication, such as Twitter, blogs, etc. — in the information collection phase of the buying process;

• Are pursuing their buying process more ‘massively multi-channel’ than ever before; however, channel weightings and their sequence vary by the phase of the buying process; and

• Manifest themselves more than ever as a complex, savvy ‘buying unit,’ rather than simply as a single decision-maker.

My Propelling Brands post presents a host of research data and insights that supports these points, so I’d check it out.

How should B2B marketers respond?

This shift in the nature of the B2B buyer changes nothing and yet everything.  It has little impact on the core tactics that have defined marketing for decades, and yet it must totally re-align our underlying strategy.

The most important shift is moving from the (artificial) concept of a sales funnel, and instead shifting the alignment of our marketing and sales processes to the buying cycle.  This is something that I outlined in a blog post that summarizes my recent conversation with Meg Heuer, an analyst with SiriusDecisions.  She advocates for a totally buying-cycle-centric mindset.  And she’s right.

I believe the implication for B2B marketers is a re-envisioning of the marketing role.  Rather than thinking about B2B marketing as simply a lead-generation apparatus (and then being frustrated with the differential quality of those leads), marketing must be positioned as the manager of upstream buyer dialogue — via inbound and outbound marketing tactics — and the filter of knowing when a buyer is ready to buy. 

Given sales will not be engaged until later and later in the process — as that is the trend — and buyers will more than ever be shaped by what they see and read online, B2B marketing must take over managing this exchange and driving community participation.  This is critical to shaping early perceptions of buyers and to ensuring your firm is part of their consideration set as they progress through their buying cycle. 

The hand-off of prospects from marketing to sales should consequently be accompanied by an acknowledgement that these prospects are truly in a buying mode (which is known, given upstream dialogue); moreover, marketers must pass along the previous dialogue to the sales team member — to better prepare them for success and to ensure continuity of dialogue. 

A critical element in this new approach is leveraging your marketing automation platform — which shifts from serving as a tactical campaign management system to becoming a strategic dashboard for architecting, managing and monitoring all of your buyer interactions.  And this should serve as the cornerstone for processes and systems that help you scale ‘mass one-on-one conversations’ that ultimately will fuel your sales pipeline.

Want to learn more?  Join us on Thursday at the DMA’s B2B Engagement Email Marketing Conference and participate in the dialogue.

Adam Needles (Twitter: @abneedles) is Director, Field Marketing, and the B2B marketing evangelist for Silverpop.

Tags :