There are very few topics in B2B sales that are as polarizing as the debate over how much the Internet has changed B2B buying.
Some sales people say customers can find their own products and services online, everything has changed, fire B2B sales reps, blah blah blah.
Some others say not a single customer has placed an order on their website, nothing has changed, yada yada yada.
As practitioners of Integrated Marketing, we have always advocated the middleground. In Just Because Customers Can Find Their Own Solutions Doesn’t Mean They Will, we asserted that reports of the demise of B2B sales reps are greatly exaggerated. In Don’t Let Your Competitors’ Inbound Marketing Steal Leads From Your Cold Calls, we emphasized the pressing need for digital marketing.
Regardless of who has been saying what, all of these positions have been qualitative.
That changed recently when we stumbled upon the following exhibit on Gartner website:
This graphic provides an excellent overview of the B2B buying journey along with the underlying activities.
This gave us a chance to drill down to the level of each activity, assess whether it has changed or not with the onset of the Internet, and thereby quantify the extent to which the Internet has changed B2B buying.
Some decisions were straightforward:
- “Web Search”: Without Internet, there’s no web; without web, there’s no web search. Tally one for CHANGE.
- “More Information Needed From Sales Reps”: Before and after Internet, there comes a stage in virtually every B2B purchase journey when the customer needs more information of the nature that can only be supplied by a sales rep e.g. reference customer lists, ROI studies, and so on. Tally one for NO CHANGE.
But others were tricky e.g. “White Paper Download”.
Before and after the Internet, B2B customers have read white papers before making a purchase decision. For the uninitiated, white papers in B2B technology cover a range of topics from business pain areas and high level solutions through to analyst reports on specific technologies and nuts and bolts of specific products. The Internet has however brought about a change in the source of this content:
- Before Internet, customers got white papers from vendor sales reps.
- After Internet, they’re able to download white papers directly from vendors’ websites and / or marketing collateral marketplaces like Scribd.
(Before and after Internet, some customers commission consultants – think Capacity Planning Group of TCS – to develop customized content for their specific situation.)
It was a tough call to tag this activity but, in the end, we went with CHANGE because the term “download” is strongly associated with Internet.
In this manner, we tagged each activity in the above illustration. Given below is the result of this exercise:
We totaled up the number of changed (pink tagged) and unchanged (green tagged) activities from above exhibit and arrived at the following tally:
Based on the above, we can conclude that, drumroll please…
Internet has changed B2B buying by 45 percent.
We now have a percentage to denote how much Internet has changed B2B buying. But I’d be kidding myself if I thought that would end the longstanding debate. Because
- Some B2B sales reps will point to the 45% changed activities and say that Internet has driven a lot of change in B2B buying.
- Whereas other B2B sales reps will point to the 55% unchanged activities and say that, since a majority of activities have not changed, Internet hasn’t changed B2B buying much.
Nothing right, nothing wrong, it’s just a question of perspective.
Key is to appreciate that our quantitative model
- Gives us numbers to argue with!
- Makes it evident that activities at the top of the funnel (TOFU) have changed more than activites at the bottom of the funnel (BOFU).
- Reinforces McKinsey’s warning to B2B vendors that “Your prospects may be ‘liking’ or ‘not liking’ your offer even before your sales rep has presented it”.
- Illuminates the role of a website in B2B sales. While we may not receive an order from it, it’s clear that a good website is vital for generating leads. See Role Of Analytics For B2B Websites for some related reading.
- Cautions us that a fully fledged comparison between two processes should not be restricted to their underlying activities but must also take into account the artefacts related to those activities. In other words, the noun “change” is as important as the verb “change”.
This is how our exercise of quantifying the extent of change brought about by Internet to B2B buying advances the discussion on this topic.
We take this opportunity to reiterate that it’s not about outbound marketing versus inbound marketing. B2B vendors need both outbound and inbound marketing – a/k/a Integrated Marketing – to align their sales and marketing process with the purchasing behavior of today’s Buyer 2.0.