According to a recent survey by Gartner, prospects spend 50% of their time seeking information from third-party sources.* Why not study their moves?

What is buyer intent?

Buyer intent looks at aggregated behavioral signals to identify potential prospects in the buying cycle. There are a variety of data points that can represent buying intention.

Intent data can include the following behaviors:

• Web site visits and the frequency of visits
• What specific articles or pages a user is reading
• Which topics seem to interest users most
• Engagement with sales or marketing emails

Essentially, intent data is any type of information that indicates a lead is in the buying phase of their customer journey. The main sources of intent marketing include web traffic, off-site activity, data from your CRM, social media metrics, search intent, and content consumption data.

How is intent data collected?

There are a few types of resources that help businesses capture buyer intent. This includes both internal and external buyer intent tools.

Internal data

Any data that a company collects on its own is considered “internal data.” Also referred to as “first-party” intent data, it is information that is collected in-house using a variety of systems, such as application logs, a marketing automation platform, or customer relationship management (CRM) software.

Most CRMs will display metrics for what visitors are doing on your site. The benefits of collecting internal data include total control of what you capture and how, accuracy, and security.

Additionally, a business can act immediately on internal data and customize exactly what classifies as purchase intent. There’s no waiting for another party to deliver your data. This provides a good way to get started with buyer intent data.

External data

Another way of collecting intent data is through a third-party data collection company. This is typically sourced through cookies or IP lookups on specific websites. Because collected internal data can be complex, external data provides an easier means to the same end.

External data is distinct from internal business intelligence because it is generated by and purchased from outside agencies. This data is used by the purchaser to filter out potential buyers and is even packaged as marketing qualified leads (MQLs).

However, there are some disadvantages to going this route. The company you choose must always be GDPR-compliant. You’ll also need to set up clear expectations and closely monitor the deliverables for consistent accuracy and value of data you purchase.

Data should be sourced from leading industry sites that consumers are using to educate themselves. Research is usually based on search intent, prior buying patterns, and prior buying patterns.

Key indicators of buyer intent

In order to ensure prospects are exclusively a good fit, do your homework. You need to position the segmenting and targeting work around a buyer persona. Otherwise, you could end up with leads who, on the surface, look good, but may never buy a thing.

The first step is deciding what the company values as important and how to score interactions with key decision-makers. You should also account for who is interacting with your brand. There’s no point in spending time tracking and scoring leads that aren’t a good fit.

Key considerations when compiling intent data include:

Recency

How recently has a prospect engaged with the brand? This is super important data. If you wait weeks to contact someone after visiting the site, they probably already made a buying decision.

People waste no time these days and thus, speed matters in sales. The faster you react, the more deals you close.

Frequency

How often are people coming back? The more they return, the more likely they are to buy. If you see a lead frequently viewing pages for pricing or case studies, you can easily assume they are far into the buying cycle. At this point, the sales team needs to reach out.

Engagement

Most lead scoring systems count user engagement. If an individual is engaging with content on your site via chat, email, or other forms of interaction, it’s a good indication they are ready to talk.

How is buyer intent data used?

So, once all of this information is collected, what do you do with it?

You can use buyer intent data in a number of ways. For starters, it’s a key asset for customer acquisition. It works to greatly improve segmenting and targeting of account-based marketing campaigns. Intent data also helps to better align your messaging to buyers’ needs.

Some ways in which you can put buyer intent data to use today include:

Maximize outreach

Intent data gives your sales team a leg up. Sales teams don’t have to wait for buyers to complete an action to identify interest. With simple buyer intent signals, it’s now possible to prioritize outreach based on specific behaviors.

Reduce churn

After the sales team converts a prospect, a business can continue to monitor clients who research the competition. This data points to customers who may need additional support or attention. This usually indicates your product or customer service is failing in some way.

Set up triggers that request buyer feedback to help identify gaps for future product development. Intent data helps to uncover problems before buyers even utter a peep. This reduces the churn rate and adds to overall customer satisfaction.

Guide for messaging

Buyer intent data works to strategically target in-market prospects and convert them to quality leads. This type of data provides insight into prospect research history, including specific products and brands.

Research by Gartner found that “by the end of 2022, more than 70% of B2B marketers will utilize third-party intent data to target prospects or engage groups of buyers in selected accounts.”*

Buyer intent data can be used to better craft unique and specific messaging that speaks to segmented audiences in different ways. Rather than using generic marketing tactics, you can better align your outreach with specific interest signals that buyers leave, such as cookie crumbs across third-party sites.

Pros & cons of buyer intent data

When it comes to using this type of data to conduct business, there are two sides to the coin. Here are some pros and cons:

Pros

Efficient prospecting

For a sales team, closing deals is the top priority. Buyer intent data simplifies prospecting with a layer of business intelligence. Knowing who is looking at what content means you can tailor messaging with more direct targeting.

It also means sales can engage leads as early as possible while collecting information on how and what prospects are researching. Sales will be able to prospect SQLs in a fraction of the time.

Improve outbound sales

This is about working smarter, not harder. The sales cycle can be long. Giving your team direct access to buyer intent data allows them to reach out to the most qualified leads and spend less time on people who aren’t really interested.

It also increases the ROI of your B2B content syndication efforts. See who’s reaching out and target more efficiently.

Sales prioritization

Practice advanced sales prioritization with buyer intent data that lights the way. Traditional lead scoring relies on adding points when certain actions are taken.

Intent data helps to uncover additional avenues a lead takes during the buying cycle. This can be used in a more precise way to predict purchase intent and prioritize contacts.

Personalization & targeting

Intent data helps both the sales and marketing departments to run more accurate account-based campaigns. Successful outreach, including buyer enablement, is built on personalization.

The most effective way to improve B2B campaigns is to provide a continuous stream of relevant content. It allows you to strategically nurture leads by segmenting lists and adjusting the messages accordingly.

Relevancy

When you closely understand consumer problems, you can create more relevant content. Buyer intent data helps to uncover common obstacles and issues people run into that pertain to the product or service you provide.

These insights can be used to better guide content creation and increase inbound leads. Create content that directly reflects exactly what people are interested in and watch the social return on investment skyrocket.

Cons

Accuracy issues

When it comes to purchasing buyer intent data from a third party, there is no true way to confirm the data is accurate. You are simply relying on good faith that the company is giving you correct information.

Leads can be anywhere

Third-party agencies that provide external buyer data include leads that can be anywhere in the funnel. Rather than focus on one buyer stage, most outside sources will send them to you along the entire journey.

That means, purchasing buyer data with the intent of using it for top-of-the-funnel messaging can be risky. Your business is going in directly for the sale when some buyers may just be getting to know you. It comes off as pushy.

Too specific 

Being too specific in targeting can lead a sales team right back to blind targeting. There is such a thing as over-personalization. Zeroing in on super-specific characteristics of a potential buyer can cut out people that are actually willing to buy.

You risk not reaching a wide enough audience and missing out on sales. You should employ critical thinking to determine the fine line between being too general or too specific in your messaging.

Waiting to reach out  

Having sales and marketing wait to respond to buyers reaching out can cost you. Sometimes outbound cold-calling is the best form of gathering new leads.

Non-compliance 

The worst issue a business can run into when purchasing buyer intent data is that it was captured in a way that’s deemed “non-compliant” with the latest data security standards and regulations. Control and management is necessary to ensure the data is being used properly.

If it’s not used correctly, you can face non-compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which can lead to some hefty fines.

Is buyer intent data worth it?

It all depends on how a business wants to spend its money. Top-of-the-funnel leads require a lot more time and attention. This means fewer leads for your money.

Perhaps a better option is to purchase buyer intent when prospects are part-way down the funnel and use CRM and internal data before that. You can then allocate resources to more profitable endeavors, such as ad spend, customer engagement campaigns, and content creation.

Buyer intent data is most valuable when a business has a well-crafted buyer persona and has the capacity to follow through with leads in a timely manner. A poorly crafted buyer persona or failure to pay attention to details means wasted money on missed opportunities.

Many businesses start targeting before they have fully segmented the audience. Narrow the focus and build out the value prop with relevant content. Then, it will make more sense to purchase buyer intent data. This establishes buyer confidence that your company can solve their biggest problems.

Sources:

*“Emerging Technology Analysis: Leveraging Intent Data for Marketing and Demand Generation.” Alan Antin. Gartner. February 11, 2020.

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Yet, there is a time when idealism can work for us. When developing a marketing program, consider building an ideal customer profile. An ideal customer profile is an exercise and tool in understanding your target audience and optimizing your marketing efforts.

What is an ideal customer profile?

An ideal customer profile (ICP) is a comprehensive account of your company’s perfect customer. Ideal customer profiles are crucial for account-based marketing (ABM) and targeting enterprise customers.

Ideal customer profiles are often used in B2B marketing. They allow marketers and stakeholders to understand the institutional needs of their target market. With an ICP, marketers can tailor programs to better meet these needs.

Why use an ideal customer profile?

If you ask any B2B marketer in the world, they could probably tell you it’s a company within a certain size range, located in a certain area in the world, who has a need for their product.

The problem? Some of these companies that fit this profile are ideal customers, and some are less-than-ideal. When you are budgeting your digital marketing efforts, you want to focus on the best match.

B2B marketers can use an ICP to understand the full customer journey and find a stronger product-customer fit.

What is an ideal customer?

Let’s say you have one extremely high-revenue customer. They are loyal and they pay you the equivalent of 50 smaller customers. Great, right?

But, they take up 80 percent of your server bandwidth. They have a half-dozen dedicated account managers. They need round-the-clock customer support.

Is this your ideal customer? Would you want to replicate this customer 100 times over? Or, is your ideal customer a bit more manageable, that would allow your company to scale and grow?

It can be easy to have dollar signs in your eyes when thinking about your ideal customer. In this case, it’s important not to equate the biggest invoice with the best value.

An ideal customer is one that is profitable, scalable, and a long-term fit for your business growth.

How do you create an ICP?

There are six steps to create an ideal customer profile.

Collect customer data

Start with what you already know. Consult data collected through your CRM, customer data platform and other analytics tools. This will begin to illustrate the quantitative trends in your target market.

You may want to use a spreadsheet or business intelligence (BI) solution to layer your customer data. This will allow you to identify trends and note your ‘best’ customers.

Identify ‘ideals’ in your customer data

When combing through your data, note some of the traits of your best customers.  Those may be tied to revenue, customer acquisition cost, and/or sales cycle length.

Once you identify the categories, get specific. Is your highest-revenue customer $10,000/year or $100,000/year? Were they expensive to acquire? Did they have the longest or shortest sales cycle?

Answering these questions about customer engagement decisively will paint a picture not of a customer, but of the ideal customer.

Document customer traits & demographics

Identify the things that you can see about your ideal customer. These might be their:

• industry
• location
• biggest decision-makers
• number of employees
• corporate structure
• annual revenue/share price (if applicable)
• board structure

Research the ‘unknowns’ about your ideal customer

You know how your customer interacts with your company. Yet, that’s one small piece of who they are.

Here are a few questions you can ask of your best customers when building an ideal customer profile:

• What was the pain point that led you to seek out our product?
• What are your company’s other pain points or immediate needs?
• Who at your company benefits most from using our product?
• What other B2B solutions does your company use?
• What is the outlook for your company and industry over the next few years?

Detail how your company helps your ideal customer.

So far, you have created a great ideal target account profile. How do you turn it into an ideal customer profile?

Document how your product serves your ideal customer. Your new understanding of their business should make this exercise clear. How does your product solve their pain points, and how will that continue into the future?

Document your findings in a customer profile.

Once you’ve completed your research, combine your findings into your final customer profile. It should paint a picture of the exact company you’d like to have using your product with great detail. This will guide your digital marketing and sales teams on whom to target.

Ideal customer profile vs. buyer persona

Modern marketing programs rely on buyer personas, or fictionalized versions of potential customers. If you are selling a manufacturing product, your buyer personas may be ‘Project Manager Pam,’ or ‘Budget Owner Bob.’

Buyer personas are useful when using buyer enablement marketing on a personal level. XYZ Manufacturing is not going to click on your LinkedIn ad or read your blog post, but Project Manager Pam might.

Ideal customer profiles zoom out from buyer personas. They are a holistic look at the entire firm, rather than the pain points of the individual decision maker. Ideal customer profiles and buyer personas are best used in concert with one another.

How can you use an ICP?

The modern B2B marketing and sales process relies on a true understanding of the target market. An ideal customer profile can influence these revenue programs in several ways:

Improving your account-based marketing

An ideal customer profile serves as a template for an account-based marketing (ABM) target account list, Your account-based marketers can use an ICP as a template for finding potential customers.

Improve MQLs & SQLs

Use your ideal customer profile to qualify leads. If a lead is less than 50 percent similar to your ideal customer, you can take them out of your funnel. You can also use a rubric to compare leads against your ICP. By doing this, you focus on moving along leads that have the potential to be your best customers.

Improve your product-market fit

Your ICP may have revealed that your ideal customer has needs that you are not meeting. This profile can identify gaps in your product-market fit. These gaps are opportunities to innovate your product. This can lead to better, longer-term customer relationships.

Conclusion

Creating an ideal customer profile can refresh your digital marketing and sales focus. By completing this exercise, you can renew your focus on bringing in the best customers for your company’s growth.

If you’re looking for systems and tools to manage customer data, align your sales and marketing teams around the customer journey, and build lasting customer relationships, then check out Insightly’s unified platform for sales and marketing.

Request a demo

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Having covered the fundamentals, we now turn to key best practices for using a unified CRM to drive your ABM efforts.

Eight best practices to drive ABM success with a unified CRM

Use the tactics below to maximize the ROI of your ABM initiatives.

1. Secure buy-in from internal stakeholders

Your account-based marketing program will only succeed if you obtain buy-in from your sales and marketing leaders. They allocate their teams’ respective budgets. If they aren’t fully committed to or convinced of the value of running an ABM program, your work is exponentially less likely to succeed.

Both teams and their leaders must be involved in every step of the process. You don’t want to spend a month preparing your strategy and approach, only to later discover that there’s not enough available budget or time to implement the strategy.

2. Build your ABM team

Who will drive your ABM efforts? You don’t want to apply your account-based marketing methodology to all prospect and customer upsell accounts. You need to select the right individuals to engage in and drive the program to a select group of prospects.

A great way to kick things off is by starting with a pilot program to test the waters (more on that below). Select the individuals you feel are best suited for the job. This initial team should include one marketer and at least one sales rep.

That sales rep should only own a few accounts due to the extensive research and outreach involved. We suggest you cap the accounts an individual rep owns/manages at eight or less in the beginning. If you spread a salesperson too thin, they won’t be able to devote the time and effort necessary to make your ABM program a success.

PRO TIP: Don’t forget to loop in important members of other teams, such as customer success, who will play a role in your program.

3. Align sales & marketing

Sales and marketing alignment involves more than the two teams getting along well. It requires them to align their thought processes around multiple variables and goals. These include gaining consensus around how accounts are identified and targeted, how ABM plans are created, and the roles each team will play throughout the process.

4. Account identification & selection

At this point, you’ll start using your unified CRM to help drive your program. All the data stored in your CRM will make it easy to identify the accounts with the greatest potential to generate the most revenue.

It’s important that data is entered into your CRM according to your established process. That data will provide insight into each targeted account’s challenges, goals, and needs, allowing you to personalize your outreach and develop content that aligns with those variables.

Moreover, your CRM data will tell you which engagement channels a target account’s contacts use the most. You’ll also gain insight into the content they prefer and the outcomes of previous conversations they’ve had with sales. This knowledge will aid you in the planning stage.

PRO TIP: As you move forward, consider using your unified CRM to set up an account-based scoring model. That model should award points to individual contacts when they take actions that indicate they fit your ideal customer profile. Compile those points for an aggregate account score to identify new candidates for future ABM efforts.

5. Account planning: Building your ABM strategy

At this stage, you’ll want to document the types of outreach that will best engage your target account. You’ll also define campaign cadence and prospect management strategies.

Additional tactics for ABM account planning include:

• Creating account-specific messaging to drive content creation and one-on-one outreach
• Developing personalized content that offers solutions to each account’s challenges
• Defining the metrics that you’ll track to measure success
• Determining the channels through which your content should be delivered and at which stage of the buyer’s journey they should be sent

PRO TIP: Sales and marketing should collaborate on all of the above from the beginning. Both teams must be on the same page about every aspect of the process, from start to finish.

6. Create automated workflows in your unified CRM

You use your CRM data to identify the best accounts to target. Then, you use the marketing automation features in your unified solution to create meticulously-defined workflows that drive your outreach and internal processes during an ABM campaign.

For example, you might set up an automated, triggered email that is sent when a contact at your target account takes a specified action. In this way, you can deliver personalized content to the right prospect-account stakeholders at just the right time. This moves the account further through the sales cycle.

7. Start with a pilot campaign

When first starting, try a pilot campaign targeting one or two accounts and apply your defined ABM methodology. Your ABM program can stray from the course easily, and if it does, you’ll want to minimize the impact of potential mistakes committed along the way.

A pilot program will act as a learning experience, teaching you where you should improve, what worked, and ultimately refining your ABM strategy.

8. Measure ABM results & refine your methodology

Because you’ll have already defined the metrics you want to track, measuring the performance and results of your pilot program will be easy. Not least of all because your unified CRM will be tracking and collecting data to analyze from day one.

The reports and analysis generated by your CRM will highlight areas for improvement so you can refine your approach.

Ease your way into account-based marketing and continually improve your strategy and accompanying tactics. By the time you’re ready to put your program into fifth gear, your methodology should be rock solid.

Ready to get started?

By following the best practices above, you’ll be much more likely to run a successful ABM program and realize success in less time. If you try to wing it, you’ll trudge through a series of mistakes caused by trial and error. With a set methodology, you’ll have a roadmap that lays out steps to take as you prepare for, build, and launch your account-based marketing.

Read more like this:

• What is account-based marketing (ABM)? A beginner’s guide
• Top 10 benefits of a unified CRM
• From personalized to humanized marketing
• The new B2B purchase process

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Let’s start with the “why.” Recent survey data indicates that 91% of respondents claim accounts won through ABM have a larger average deal size. They also report that a quarter of those deals are at least 50% larger than non-ABM deals.(1)

Moreover, as far back as 2016, companies using ABM were generating 208% more revenue for their marketing efforts.(2) That number is certainly higher today as ABM continues to grow.

What is account-based marketing?

Instead of casting a broad net in hopes of capturing more leads, account-based marketers work with sales to identify and reach out to prospects that are the best possible fit for their product or service and are high-value. Ample research is involved, and we’ll touch on that below.

With ABM, you must treat each individual prospect as though they were a distinct, separate market with unique needs, challenges, and goals. There are no carpet-bombing marketing campaigns involved; all outreach is direct, one-on-one communication.

Account-based marketing is almost exclusively used by B2B businesses. This is due to the complexity of the B2B sales cycle and the number of people involved in the decision-making process.

Key considerations associated with ABM

Because ABM differs so significantly from traditional “bulk” marketing, it’s important to understand some key components of ABM and how it works.

Ideal customer profiles

Developing ideal customer profiles (ICPs) is similar to creating and aligning buyer personas with the buyer journey. But they differ in important ways.

For example, two individuals at the same prospect organization may have competing objectives or conflicting opinions. That should be noted in your overarching ICP. Successful ABM requires you to take granular, detailed notes and understand your prospect in a much deeper, personal way. You must know and anticipate every minute detail that could impact the sales cycle and buying process.

Humanizing the prospect: high-quality vs. high-volume

The point of ABM is to focus on prospect quality rather than generating a high volume of leads. ABM lets marketing and sales contact pre-qualified leads rather than unqualified, cold leads. Lead scoring can help identify the most sales-ready prospects. Ultimately, one highly-qualified prospect with a proven propensity to purchase is worth 100 cold leads who’ve shown no interest.

When you first make contact, your prospect will feel as though they are communicating with an old friend, not a faceless salesperson. In this way, ABM starts to resemble humanized marketing.

Sales & marketing alignment

Sales and marketing alignment is vital in ABM. These two teams’ collaboration must be airtight for ABM to work properly. Once you’ve identified your target prospect accounts, you begin researching them individually. This kicks off a series of steps involved in successful account-based marketing.

Furthermore, sales and marketing will collaborate better with improved business transparency and if the entire ABM process is managed in a unified CRM.

ABM prospect research

Marketing and sales conduct exhaustive research on each individual prospect. They learn who the decision makers are, the company’s needs, pain points, goals, history, and any additional insights they can find.

With a unified CRM, much of that data is readily available for both teams, alleviating miscommunication or misinterpretation of data. The remaining required research will take place on social media, via internet searches, and anywhere else information can be found about the prospect and its decision makers.

When to use ABM

You don’t need to apply an account-based marketing approach to your every prospecting effort. ABM doesn’t replace traditional marketing, it complements it.

If you use ABM on every prospect, the risk/reward ratio drops significantly. You’ll spend loads of time learning about a prospect who ends up signing a small contract. The resulting cost of conducting the research and learning about the prospect is greater than the revenue generated from your account-based marketing tactics.

Instead, you want to reserve your ABM strategy for only the highest-value prospects with the greatest potential to buy. When one of them signs a five-year deal and locks in a few hundred thousand dollars of recurring revenue, your efforts won’t have gone in vain.

Benefits of account-based marketing

By now you’ll have gleaned insight into some of the top benefits involved in running an ABM campaign. First and foremost, the primary benefit of ABM is more revenue generated. Second, you save loads of time by eliminating outreach to dead-end leads and can more easily acquire new, high-value customers that lend stability to the future of your business.

Those overarching benefits stem from:

• Empowering sales to focus their attention and energy on highly-qualified prospects
• Reducing time spent on cold outreach
• Dramatically increasing your closed/won rates
• A better, more personalized customer experience and buyer’s journey for your most valuable prospects and customers
• Increased efficiency and time saved that can be spent on developing deeper customer relationships
• Easier tracking of results to identify what’s working. Your unified CRM can track every interaction your teams have with individual prospect accounts and the contacts in those accounts
• Improved sales and marketing alignment, which naturally leads to faster revenue growth

What to learn more about ABM?

Keep an eye out for our next piece on account-based marketing. In this piece, we covered ABM basics. In our next piece, we’ll dig into ABM best practices and how a unified CRM can guide your success.

Sources:

1. “State of Account Based Marketing,” SiriusDecisions, 2017

2. “Flipping Funnels Weekly: Account-Based Marketing Isn’t The Death of Anything,” Terminus, 2016

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A customer journey map gives B2B suppliers an effective model for how and where to connect with customers during this pre-sales research period. Marketing automation systems allow marketers to deliver increasingly detailed information to buyers to help move them from awareness to purchase. As buyers near the bottom of the funnel, sales reps ramp up their efforts, in hopes of securing a conversation, being able to show a demo, and move the process toward a deal.

Yet, that final inch can feel like a mile, or an eternity. Anyone who has engaged in this process knows that the plethora of options, opinions and information customers encounter—whether online or in person—is overwhelming.

According to Gartner, “77% of buyers agree that purchasing has become very complex and difficult.” Further, “Today’s B2B buying involves more stakeholders than ever before. The median B2B buying group involves six to 10 decision makers‚ each armed with four or five pieces of information they have gathered for themselves.”*

How can companies help buyers get to the finish line? It’s time to think about the purchasing process differently.

A job-based model of B2B purchasing

The customer journey is predicated on the idea that once buyers become aware of a problem or potential solution, they move in a generally forward manner toward decision and purchase. Along the way, they will seek and encounter various pieces of content that will help propel them toward purchase. But what if this process is not linear, and actually involves a fair amount of circling and backtracking? And what if the very content suppliers are providing contributes to this backtracking?

In the recent Marketing-Fueled Buyer Enablement report based on primary research, Gartner identifies six distinct jobs in the buying process: problem identification, solution exploration, requirements building, supplier selection, validation, and consensus creation.

Let’s take a quick look at each of these tasks.

Problem identification

The jumping off point for every B2B purchase, this job entails pinpointing the problem that needs to be addressed. To do this, buyers may conduct research online and download content such as white papers and reports. It’s easy to become overwhelmed by information at this stage, and while problem identification seems straightforward, buyers may return to it as they improve their understanding of the source or scope of the problem.

Solution exploration

This job is all about identifying the available solutions to the problem. This may include web searches, online and in-person discussions with peers, speaking to supplier reps at a tradeshow or event, reading customer reviews, and more.

Requirements building

In this step, buyers look more specifically at how the solution will function in their own company. They may create and evaluate responses to an RFP, view demos, and download resources to answer questions such as, Which systems will this solution need to integrate with? How will the solution fit in with our company’s existing processes and procedures? Because different solutions may have different requirements, buyers may need to return to this step multiple times during the purchase process.

Supplier selection

Once buyers understand their internal requirements for the solution, they can narrow down the list of suppliers to those that meet their needs. Buying group changes, budget cuts, and legal flags are just some of the circumstances that might send buyers back to explore additional solutions before they can complete this step.

Validation

During this stage, buyers will evaluate their chosen solution by corroborating suppliers’ claims, soliciting end user feedback and references, and looking at third-party expert analyses. This is one of two jobs that Gartner considers to be “always-on” during the purchase process.

Consensus building

At the end of the day, buyers must be able to convince the rest of the buying group of the merits of their chosen solution. But consensus building tasks begin much earlier, as buyers work to develop a shared understanding of the problem and requirements, and continue throughout the process as buyers educate other stakeholders about what they have learned, work to deconflict information found through separate research processes, and ultimately agree on a solution.

As in any complex process, these jobs are not strictly linear. According to Gartner, “90% of buyers reported revisiting, or looping back to at least one job as part of their overall purchasing process.” From this vantage point, we believe it’s clear that buyers need help navigating this process. Suppliers that can provide this help will be at a significant advantage.

Shifting the focus to buyer enablement

Gartner’s term “buyer enablement” describes a very specific type of content marketing: information that enables customers to complete critical buying jobs.

“Instead of focusing content marketers’ efforts on constant generation of thought leadership, white papers, infographics and videos, marketing leaders should rebalance their content efforts, capitalizing on their deep industry knowledge and customer empathy to develop and deploy information to help buyers buy‚” says Martha Mathers, Managing VP, Gartner.

We believe that suppliers who can ease the buying process for customers will enjoy faster sales. But that’s not all. A less complex process has a value in and of itself, and suppliers who can facilitate it are likely to foster greater customer satisfaction as well.

Where does this leave sales?

Is this the end of marketing and sales as we know it? No. Based on this new model, marketing and sales alignment becomes more important than ever. Sales and marketing need to draw on their collective expertise and work together to create and deploy the high-quality tools that make it easier for customers to navigate and complete the purchase process.

Modern B2B buyers get their information from multiple sources, including online searches and conversations with sales reps, so it’s most important that they get relevant and consistent information, no matter how they’re engaging with the supplier.

At Insightly, we offer a free needs assessment and customized product demos to help our potential customers decide whether our solutions are right for them. To learn more about Insightly’s unified platform for sales, marketing, and project management, request a demo and let’s talk.

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*Gartner for Marketers “Marketing-Fueled Buyer Enablement,” 2019

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