The Age of the Self-Service Buyer
Our Founder and CEO, Vinay Bhagat, had the opportunity to speak at the Chief Marketing Officer Summit by CMO Alliance on the topic, “The Age of the Self-Service Buyer.” Throughout his presentation, Vinay surfaced insights on today’s behaviors, collected during our 2022 B2B Buying Disconnect research study. These new insights change how vendors sell and market today.
Vinay’s talk specifically focused on our 2022 B2B Disconnect Survey (to be released in June), which is our annual research study that bridges the gap between the ways professionals buy technology and the way vendors sell and market. The most important trend is self-service buying, which is changing the B2B landscape.
Top buyer insights:
- Around 65% of tech buyers are millennials/GenZ, who mainly research online rather than relying on vendor resources
- The top three self-service options that vendors add to their site to make buyers more likely to buy from them are software pricing, options for accessing demos/free trials, and customer reviews
- Across all segments (product pricing, age, etc.) year-over-year, buyer usage of vendor reps is declining
- Virtually 100% of buyers want to self-serve before ever engaging with a salesperson
Key take-aways:
- As evidenced by this research, vendors need new go-to-market strategies for finishing and converting buyers
- It’s important to incorporate third-party sources and validation within your marketing strategy
- Focusing on increasing qualified, organic traffic is key to being discoverable
- Utilizing intent data is crucial to reaching and winning more in-market buyers
Vinay also focuses on actionable steps that vendors can take to head in the right direction, as buyers continue to lean more on self-service options and less on communicating directly with vendor reps.
…the bottom line is, as marketers, we’ve got to figure out how to adapt and tune our processes to be more effective with today’s buyer.
How exactly do we adapt to today’s buyers? Well, Vinay presents three core strategies for building out new GTM approaches:
- Improve discoverability across third-party and owned properties
- Differentiate by using the customer voice across channels
- Converting buyers with downstream intent data
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