How to escape B2B ‘buying mayhem’ with vendors ‘still stuck in the 1980s’

1. The evolution of the ‘B2B buying network’

Based in large part on Forrester’s annual B2B buying survey of around 10,000 global B2B buyers, that ‘buying mayhem’ refers to a confluence of forces that come to a head in what Ferron calls “a growing chasm between what buyers are doing and what vendors are doing in their sales, marketing and go-to-market motions.”

“Essentially, what we’ve seen is that buyers are moving fast into today’s age with all the technologies and all the capabilities that are out there, whereas the vendors are still stuck in the 1980s,” Ferron says.

The principal factor in this evolution is the growing ubiquity and size of what Forrester calls “buying groups” or “buying networks.” In short, while it can simplify things to imagine that a single person on the other side of the phone or computer is your target B2B buyer, the reality is, Ferron says, that the target is nearly always a group of people.

It makes sense: as that famous IBM line makes clear, B2B purchases are often so expensive that jobs can be on the line if the purchase goes wrong. And purchases do often go wrong: in the latest edition of that Forrester survey, 81% of buyers end up dissatisfied with the winning vendor (this year’s event will update that figure).

Making a group of people with diverse skillsets responsible for the purchase is a de-risking measure on the buyers’ side, but as that group expands, so does the complexity for sellers and the number of potential blockers. Ferron’s latest figures put a dizzying number on the average size of a B2B buying group for large purchases: 19.

“That’s 19 people with their own opinions; 19 people who can stall a deal,” Ferron says. And yet still, he says: “Companies do acknowledge that there’s a buying group, but they still go back to outdated practices. They still market and sell to individuals. Often, a seller still has an ‘opportunity’ with just one person and even though we know that that one person will not be the deciding factor, they still maintain that it’s going to be indicative of whether something closes or not. That’s just ridiculous.”

2. Influence everywhere

And it’s not just that formal team of decision-makers that’s growing the complexity of the buying process. For one thing, Forrester counts, on average, 13 ‘external influencers’ on top of that core group of 19.

Ferron says that group of influencers isn’t limited to but certainly does include the growing group of B2B influencers operating on social media.

In other words, it is now impossible to narrow that purchase decision down to a single buyer; marketing and selling to a buying group instead has to start with mapping that group and its often diverse perspectives on the purchase, Ferron says.

3. The AI factor

Ferron says the “accelerating” impact of ubiquitous and rapidly developing generative AI complicates things further. Forrester’s research finds that 94% of buyers now use the tech in the buying process.

That compounds another shift in the technology of B2B marketing and sales: only recently has the balanced tipped over such that the majority of people in those buying groups are either Millennial or Gen Z, Ferron says: generations “very comfortable doing everything on line,” resulting in vendors “struggling to get them to engage” with the traditional methods of a phone conversation or an in-person meeting.

With the sales process more online than ever and online interactions more mediated by AI than ever, some may be concerned that we’ll lose the old way of doing things, with “a future of no phone sales” and agent-to-agent selling, says Ferron. The good news: “The reality is that we’re not there yet… but vendors are feeling out of control. It’s a very confusing situation. Vendors need to realize that they have a role to play. They are part of the solution and they need to enable buyers to make the right decisions. If [vendors] play that role where they help them find the unbiased and realistic information and enable them to bring that buying group together and enable them to have a conversation based on real facts and figures and data, then they’ll earn trust and empathy and that will be the deciding factor in many cases.”

‘We’re recommending the death of MQLs’

Ferron and his Forrester colleagues have not been mincing their words when it comes to what needs to change for the buying process to move into this new reality. Step one: kill off the idea of marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) for good.

“We’re recommending the death of MQLs,” says Ferron. “It’s a made-up number.”

Rather than following a familiar trajectory of a marketing department handing off a list of single individuals to a sales team that can plug away at that individual without any knowledge of the group behind them, Forrester says, the future lies in consistent storytelling across the entire buying group.

“The solution is a clear message. When you read a book, there’s a sequence and an expectancy. When you finish a chapter, you expect to go to a chapter that logically follows on from where you were. If you read a book that’s very disjointed, you typically won’t even finish it because it’s hard to read. What we as vendors are really bad at is telling a consistent story, but that storytelling element is going to be crucial. What’s now tricky is that the story needs to be consistent across all these different influencers that are influencing our buyers, because just selling it on our website is not going to be good enough.”

‘Revenue process transformation’

It’s not as easy as simply throwing out those MQLs, of course; they need replacing with an alternative rubric. What Ferron suggests as a process out of that old world he calls ‘revenue process transformation.’

“The revenue process that companies have is fundamentally broken; it is not up to date with what buyers expect today,” Ferron says. In that process, out go MQLs and in come thinking instead dominated by ‘opportunities’: “an object that is consistent across marketing and sales, so that when they’re talking together, they’re talking about the same thing.”

What differentiates an opportunity from an MQL is that “an opportunity with one persona underneath it is not really an opportunity. We need an opportunity with at least three but ideally more personas from that particular company attached to it.” Finding one person who has shown interest – by clicking on your website, for example – is only the very beginning, in other words. Step two is finding other people in that person’s buying network; step three is understanding and engaging with all of those people you find.

“Look in the systems, explore, go and talk to them,” Says Ferron.

The good news? Ferron says that it’s a process that can be started relatively cheaply, even with lo-fi tech such as a spreadsheet in Excel and “data protection tools you probably have already” – which a Forrester client, cybersecurity firm Palo Alto Networks, did in a pilot program. He says they saw a 200% increase in its win rates. “It doesn’t have to be massively expensive and it doesn’t even have to change things drastically – yet,” Ferron says.