SiriusDecisions, the leading global business-to-business (b-to-b) research and advisory firm, today unveiled the findings from its 2015 B-to-B Buyer Study during a keynote address at its 10th annual SiriusDecisions Summit. According to the results of the study, b-to-b buyers interact with sales representatives at every stage of the buyer's journey. This finding challenges the common industry perspective that b-to-b sales representatives’ roles and importance are declining due to a disintermediation by digital buying behaviors.

The study’s other key findings included the following:

• The price point of an offering affects the number and type of interactions that occur between a buyer and provider.
• As the price point of an offering goes up, human interactions between the buyer and the provider also increase. But even at low price points, there is evidence that human-to-human interactions occur.
• More than half the time, sales representative involvement starts at the beginning of the buyer’s journey. In complex buying scenarios, sales rep involvement starts at the beginning of the journey two-thirds of the time.
• The highest level of reported buyer/seller interaction for all buying scenarios occurred during the education phase of the buyer’s journey (the first decision gate in the purchasing decision process).
• Not only do buyers interact with a sales representative from the winning provider organization in all phases of their decision-making process, but they overwhelmingly describe those interactions as positive (in over 85 percent of the buying experiences studied).

By analyzing and ranking correlations between customer satisfaction and operational factors (such as the reasons a customer chooses one company over others, cycle times, features offered, and the use of digital channels) in our survey, four pillars of great customer-experience performance stood out:

1. Focus on the few factors that move the needle for customers

2. Ease and simplicity: The payoff trade-off

3. Master the digital-first journey, but don’t stop there

4. Brands and perceptions matter

1. The journey mapping team is too narrow. Solution: Select your team carefully to include representatives of all parts of the organization that affect the customer’s entire journey.
2. The customer journey map fails to focus on key segments and personas. Solution: Start by defining the who and developing a thorough persona (free blog post).
3. The scope of the customer journey map is insufficient. Solution: Utilize a process that identifies the complete journey from  Buy to Own to Advocate (free blog post).
4. The customer journey map is based on assumption and imagination. Solution: Do the hard work of gathering and analyzing data about the customer such as that available from Voice-of-Customer platforms (free blog post), CRM and customer care systems, web and mobile analytics, ethnographic studies and other first- and third-party sources of customer information.
5. The customer journey map was completed with an inside-out view. Solution: Follow an organized approach of Who?, When?, What? and How? to produce an outside-in journey map (free streaming webinar).
6. The customer journey mapping initiative has the wrong goal. Solution: A positive result starts with the right goals from the beginning. Set a goal of identifying problems and driving action, not producing a visual asset.

Sometimes it might feel like you are trying to find a balance between the value of one sale versus 15 or 20 micro-conversions. But the goal is to structure your content and collateral in a way that aligns with the path so that it naturally coincides with the consumer’s interest — as opposed to prioritizing one over the other regardless of the consumer context. I like to do this by creating audiences.

Create audiences based upon the collateral that the consumer has already downloaded or viewed, and use those audiences to exclude them from being served those same CTAs.

You can also use those audiences in a forward-motion strategy, to help deliver content that is lower and lower in the funnel, to help them make a purchase decision.

Doing this, in tandem with delivering the right content based upon their search queries, will allow you to provide the best experience possible, while loading up on data and driving consumers to the sale.

Many aren’t confident of their company’s understanding of big data either

Learn what content people are looking for in every stage of the buyer's journey, including ideas for content you can include in your own strategy.

We asked three generations – Baby Boomers, Gen Xers and Millennials – how they make decisions on B2B technology purchases. Their responses upturn the conventional wisdom about influences and influencers in the buying cycle.

Awareness -> Evaluation -> Purchase -> Usage -> Repurchase -> Advocacy is an example of a linear funnel. All of the dots associated with each step of the funnel create a tornado.

As you can imagine, tornadoes are a bit more difficult to deal with than simple linear funnels. Why? There are two core reasons (among many others): growth attribution and points of optimization.

So, how do you manage tornadoes? The same way you manage linear funnels… with a few tweaks. The first step is to understand your users’ behavior with conversion research. Next, you’ll want to set up your analytics configuration.  

What makes Pointillist a journey orchestration engine is that it can describe and act against customer journeys. The acting part is especially important, because it makes Pointillist more than simply an analysis tool.

What Pointillist really does from a user point of view is let you pick sets of customers and events to analyze. Users drag the events onto a workspace and connect them with lines to indicate the sequence to analyze. The system then scans its data to find how many customers had an instance of each event and draws lines whose thickness indicates how many passed customers from one event to the next. In other words, it creates a journey map.

Or, and this is my favorite part, you can tell Pointillist to discover the most important paths on its own.  It does this using machine learning to determine which paths have the highest combination of frequency, exclusivity, and correlation to a goal (a user-specified event). Users can adjust the balance among those three factors and can further train the algorithm by telling it which connections they feel are important. Because Pointillist is doing the analysis in memory and considerately visualizes its results, you can  watch it test different connections until it settles on a final set.

Discover how marketers' views on customer-centricity have been shifting, and the report contains our findings, research analysis and some advice on how marketers can step-up and be the customer champion.

Inside this free download, we investigate:

• Whether marketers understand the importance of customer-centricity - and if they are supported in this by senior management.
• Whether marketing thinks it owns the customer journey - and whether the rest of the business feels the same.
• What levels of confidence marketers have when using technology for achieving customer centricity, and whether they have the ability to influence what tech decisions are made.
• Whether marketers are the voice of the customer in their organisation and, if not, what steps they need to take to become so.

To maximize that moment, tech providers need to think about:

• Installation or Activation (for As a Service) – How to make it easy to start using the product or begin the project.  (Some of the most popular product videos on YouTube are “unboxing” videos.
• Onboarding – Helping everyone involved to understand the path to value and what is available to them.
• Help Options – Guiding users on where to go for assistance.

None of these activities should be taken for granted.  In fact, I’d posit that more emphasis should be placed in all of these.   Do it right, and things get easier.  Do it wrong, and your steering the customer toward thinking about other options or just giving up.