Gartner’s The New B2B Buying Journey  provides a stack of great insight into the modern B2B buying cycle, but one particular part stuck out for us. It’s an issue that plagues almost every project we’re involved with: linear thinking.

The traditional model of linear deal progression, with a handoff from marketing to sales, won’t work for complex modern B2B buying.

This isn’t just a C-level issue, it permeates through entire marketing teams, from the way campaigns are planned and structured, all the way through to how individual assets are created.

To understand how to best help customers advance through a complex purchase, Gartner research identified six B2B buying “jobs” that customers must complete to their satisfaction in order to successfully finalise a purchase:

• Problem identification. “We need to do something.”
• Solution exploration. “What’s out there to solve our problem?”
• Requirements building. “What exactly do we need the purchase to do?”
• Supplier selection. “Does this do what we want it to do?”
• Validation. “We think we know the right answer, but we need to be sure.”
• Consensus creation. “We need to get everyone on board.”

B2B buying doesn’t play out in any kind of predictable, linear order. Instead, customers engage in what one might call “looping” across a typical B2B purchase, revisiting each of those six buying jobs at least once.

The simple version is: the decision making is complicated, and prospects and users of your digital channels are seeking information in a way that does not fit with the orderly, linear fashion you would like them to. Content delivery systems used by B2B companies need to adjust.

Not at all complicated and completely linear.

How linear thinking is killing B2B websites

For example, we’ve advised on a number of enterprise level website redesign projects, and what strikes us most often is how many senior marketers still see their website as a book: the user arrives at the homepage, they use the contents (navigation) to access the pages that they want to read, they complete a final action, then they leave.

In reality, on most large SME and enterprise B2B websites we work with, less that 20% of the audience arrives via at the homepage, viewing an average of 2 pages per session, at a 15% returning visitor rate. Meaning that every page is conceivably the homepage, and you have limited time and space to make sure users can access the information they need before they leave and never come back.

Almost every company has access to a goldmine of intent intelligence via their website that could tell them much more about where individual users are in their buying journey, information that could be used to inform existing personalisation and automation strategies, but for the vast majority, this information isn’t used or understood because there’s a fundamental misunderstanding of user behaviour.

How linear thinking is killing B2B content

On a website, this thinking often bleeds down to an individual page level, where content is constructed like a brochure, long form, attempting to guide the user through the entire concept from start to finish. CTAs are then placed at the bottom of the content, so when the user reaches the bottom of the page, they are presented with an action, because that is the natural progression we expect.

But the reality with content is that users skim pages to find the key piece of information they’re looking for, and then they’ll move on. We worked with one client on a lead generation project, where the client was confused as to why, after they had placed CTAs at the top and bottom of key content pages, they still weren’t generating conversions. One quick heat mapping exercise later, we could show that while they had a large number of people visiting the page and 65% were scrolling to the bottom of the body content,  less than 4% of the users on the page were scrolling past the bottom of the body content, meaning only 4% of users were actually seeing the CTAs, let alone acting on them.

A user will bounce around a page to find the information they need. They will not digest it in the way you want them to, you do not have their full attention. They want the information they came for, then they want to leave. An offer may be great, but even if it’s on a page, it doesn’t mean the user is going to see it. Knowing when and where to present CTAs is as important as deploying them in the first place.

How linear thinking is killing lead nurturing campaigns

Lead nurturing campaigns are another great example of this linear thinking problem. Looking into a lot of marketing automation systems, we can tell you with some certainty that there’s still an overwhelming trend towards triggering lead nurturing workflows based on an entire start-to-finish, linear walkthrough of the business, as if they are introducing the user to the very concept of the company, explaining products and services in detail, and that somehow splitting this information into 12 emails, delivered weekly over 3 months makes it easier for a buying decision to be made.

Very few companies are customising their workflows and content strategies based on even basic intent or demographic data, like viewing certain page types, or job roles.

What customers truly want in this complex buying environment is information that helps them simplify the purchase process.

This means that once a purchase intent behaviour has been monitored, your objective should be to make it as easy as possible for our prospects to find the information they need, in a way in which they can access it when they need it, be it via personalisation, automation or great UX.

This isn’t a new behaviour, we all make decisions in an disorderly, chaotic way, we’ll doubt decisions we’ve made, seek confirmation and validation and reconfirmation and revalidation, it’s just that through digital, we have access to all of the information we need, whenever we need it, wherever we need it. B2B companies that will gain a competitive edge in this environment are those who can adapt to this behaviour, rather than force prospects to behave in the way they want.

Bern & Gray is a boutique agency specialising in designing, implementing and deploying digital marketing and martech strategies for clients in B2B and professional services. Contact us at hello@bernandgray.com

(Yes, we’re aware this CTA is placed beneath the main body content. We all make mistakes.)