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Businesses are striving to adapt ever faster to keep pace with rapid change, and yet B2B marketing practices have remained surprisingly static. Sure, the tactics have shifted to digital executions, and the use of data has made targeting B2B buyers more precise, but marketers remain rooted in fundamentally flawed assumptions about the corporate buying process.
For far too long, marketing leaders have operated on the belief that B2B purchasing decisions are almost entirely rational, driven primarily by product-feature superiority and competitive pricing. However, this conventional wisdom supposes that buyers live a Dr. Jekyll and — let’s say — Mr. Spock existence. In their private lives, they are fully formed human beings subject to all the cognitive and affective influence that B2C marketing wields to shape personal buying decisions. But when they step into the office, they become emotionless, like the famous half-Vulcan first officer of the starship Enterprise, and all of their decisions are informed solely by logic. This assumption undergirds nearly all B2B marketing efforts.
Nevertheless, the truth is that B2B buying is far more emotional and socially influenced than C-suite leaders have accepted. The same emotional triggers, social forces, and cognitive biases that influence us in our personal lives remain in play in our professional lives as levers that marketers can use to shape B2B purchasing decisions.
This shift in understanding isn’t just relevant for marketers in exclusively B2B settings; it’s a crucial insight for CMOs across industries, who often have at least one segment of business customers. Netflix must simultaneously attract individual subscribers and court advertisers; Google markets consumer-facing search along with enterprise cloud solutions. Even educational institutions like the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, where I teach, must appeal to both individual students for its MBA program and corporate partners for its executive education offerings. In each case, the underlying principles of how to influence decisions are similar, but marketers are unlikely to use similar tactics.
Of course, marketing and go-to-market strategies are going to be different for B2B than for B2Cs, even if they work on similar leverage points, because the buying processes are so different — and, as we’ll discuss, more relationally complex for B2B. To uncover the human drivers that influence purchasing decisions, I partnered with Mimi Turner, head of marketplace innovations at LinkedIn, and Jann Schwarz, senior director of marketplace innovation and strategies at LinkedIn and founder of its B2B Institute, on a research study. We surveyed 750 senior B2B buyers responsible for large-scale, enterprise purchases about their purchasing decisions. Forty-three percent were at the vice president level or above, and 41% were in organizations that had over 10,000 employees and were engaged in billion-dollar deals. Our exploration focused on what gets purchased and why once a short list of brands has been narrowed down to a final consideration set.
Our research revealed that buying decisions are heavily influenced by individuals who are not the nominal purchaser. They may be executives, such as the COO or CFO, or staff members from procurement. While B2B marketers typically target the known prospect or lead who has technical experience and domain expertise relevant to the purchase, these other individuals typically lack nuanced understanding of the product value propositions under consideration. These hidden buyers don’t download white papers or attend webinars and are more or less invisible in terms of general B2B marketing signals. They don’t turn up on lead sheets or pipeline trackers. Yet their perception of brand contributes to up to 50% of the buying decision, according to our research. Understanding and swaying these hidden influencers is critical to driving B2B purchasing.
We also found that a contributing factor to B2B purchasing decisions was how defensible the decision was. For instance, if a product bought from an established, reputable company performs poorly, the buyer is unlikely to be blamed, whereas if a purchase is made from a young startup, the buyer’s judgment may be questioned. As the old business adage went, “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.” That means the more defensible option often wins, even if a competing vendor offers a better value proposition. According to additional interviews we had with buyers, it’s also easier to get the more defensible option through procurement. This means that brand reputation matters, perhaps even more so than performance claims, once the short list has been narrowed to vendors that meet the buyer’s technical requirements. In fact, 81% of respondents said that in purchasing situations, almost everyone with a voice in the decision knew the brand that was ultimately selected. That makes brand marketing, which typically focuses on emotions and values, essential to B2B sales.
Lastly, we found that the confidence to make a purchase in a B2B context — what we call buyability — is significantly influenced by the extent to which the vendor is culturally aligned with the purchasing company. B2B buyers want to make sure that the company they’re buying from is not just good but also aligned with the working styles and priorities of their company. For instance, Patagonia, known for its strong environmental stance, discontinued its business of emblazoning its merchandise with the logos of hedge funds and tech companies, because it regarded them as contributors to planetary degradation. That means B2B marketers have to communicate not only product specs and value but also how the organization sees the world and how it acts within it.
The upshot? C-suite leaders must rethink transactional B2B marketing approaches that focus on product features and take steps to understand purchasing culture at buyer organizations. They must speak not only to nominal buyers but to unseen stakeholders that ultimately drive buying in a B2B context, and they must understand what those stakeholders value and how to influence them. Doing this well is a more significant determinant of who wins a deal than whether a product is cheaper, faster, or more efficient. Investing in brand marketing that communicates a company’s culture and values matters as much in B2B as it does in B2C.
