The game has changed for us trying to sell to other businesses.
Because buyers don’t act the same way they used to.
And we have to update our playbooks, or we will be left behind.
You see, during the pandemic, buyers learned they could make purchases without ever meeting sellers in person.
They could research solutions, discuss with teammates, and decide—all through video calls and digital information sharing.
Forget the old-school meetings and presentations.
And buyers got comfortable with this new digital-first approach. Even though we’re back to more normal office routines now, they don’t want to give up control of the process.
Research shows that 83% prefer guiding themselves through purchases rather than being “sold to.”
It’s a total flip of the power dynamic. Buyers are calling the shots on when and how they interact with potential vendors.
Cold calls, spray-and-pray emails, and disruptive ads have become ineffective against these self-educated buyers. They become deaf in the blink of an eye.
Milton Littlepage, CMO at 1Password, said in an interview in 2023:
“They’re not attending a marketing webinar, or they’re
not responding to marketing emails.They are all over the marketing websites, in reviews, and on competitor sites. They’re asking for best practices from, you know, trusted content sources.
The intent tools can find those signals and surface them. They can’t tell you who has started the buying process in the company. But they can
tell you a company has started one.Good marketers find those intent signals and form an
intent response play. And they put that in the hands of the sales team that they partner with, either give it to business
development representatives or give it straight to sales representatives, and say:This account is looking to solve this type of problem. You need to find the likely suspects leading a project like that, and you need to reach out to them and keep reaching out to them until you nail the
project.”
But that’s only one part of the puzzle. The makeup of buying teams has also transformed.
A big generational shift in the workforce is driving this evolution.
Bear with me.
The Digital-First Mindset Across Generations
Millennials and Gen Z make up a large proportion of active B2B buyers and decision-makers. But we can’t pigeonhole differing digital preferences across generations too much anymore.
- Video meetings,
- virtual document sharing,
- digital workflows.
These are standard operating procedures for how buyers like to engage nowadays. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking to a Millennial, Gen Xer, or Baby Boomer.
While comfort levels may have varied in the past, the pandemic forced every B2B buyer to get fluent in digital purchasing.
That universal adoption of self-serve research and remote evaluation has stuck even as in-person interactions have returned.
Sellers must handle digitalized, consensus-based processes. This is true not only for younger buyers.
The digital-first mindset has become pervasive across the entire B2B buying environment.
It is easy for people to learn about products online before talking to salespeople.
Because of this, teams need to make friends with customers and give them extraordinary experiences. Selling products for the sake of a quota is not enough.
The Hard Truth: Evolving Your Strategies
I know this all sounds like a big shift, and it is. For those who worked in a pre-digital era of B2B buying and selling, this is crazy.
The thing is that the marketing and sales tactics of a few years ago aren’t cutting it anymore.
We have to undergo some fundamental mindset and operational changes to stay relevant:
- Ditch the disjointed campaign mindset. Always build on integrated digital experiences tailored to self-guided buyer journeys.
- Level up your content game with insight-packed materials. You need to answer these buyers’ fundamental questions and establish your expertise.
- Use technologies like
- marketing automation,
- personalized email cadences,
- advertising engines and more to serve the right content to the right roles and personas at the right time based on behaviors.
- Get analytical about
- mapping,
- measuring
- and optimizing these journeys for each unique buying committee.
The Sales and Marketing Teams: A Diverse Cast in Your Marketing Blockbuster
Drop the old-school pitching, controlling, and information-hoarding mentalities. These clash with modern demands for full transparency and easy access to information.
Reframe your very identity to become a “buyer enabler .”A guide and consultant that shepherds the self-directed buyer journey. Do not try to force your own rigid process.
Understand the digital preferences and collaboration styles of each unique buying squad you engage with.
One-size-fits-all is dead.
Master virtual deal choreography and asynchronous progression across a dizzying array of:
- digital interactions,
- video meetings,
- content exchanges, and more.
Transform your:
- hiring profiles,
- skills development,
- coaching,
- and compensation structures.
You must now focus on these new-age seller attributes over obsolete industrial-era qualities.
When asked what the optimal role of marketing is within that equation and how marketing can be part of the solution, Milton answered:
“Forrester says 70 % of the buying cycle happens before an organization goes to a salesperson.
Our job as marketers is to position the product as the solution to the problem or the answer to The Jobs To Be Done.
Customers want to hire a vendor that gets the job to be done.
Educate the market.
We have to get past product marketing and get our customers to solve their problems in the most simple way. We have to partner with sales, educate the surrounding market, and bring in leads while surrounding companies with messages about how we can help them.
When we identify a lead, if it’s an intent signal from the account-based marketing system, we need to give them (sales) the likely problem they have and make it easy to get the job done.
Then, we need to follow up and do the job together, like in a thread.
We give sales departments superpowers.
They go from having to do their research and guessing, to having exact roadmaps to get to the bottom of the funnel and convert.
With the tools we give them, they can be faster, specific, and surgical and maximize marketing investment.
Because marketing doesn’t stop at the top of the funnel.”
The Evolving Reality in 2024 and Beyond
The digital buying revolution we’re experiencing wasn’t some temporary pandemic blip.
Even years later, in 2024, virtual purchasing behaviors and preferences have only grown more entrenched.
Institutionalized as the predominant model across B2B.
Digitally native Millennials and Gen Z now run the show with Baby boomers as active B2B buyers and decision-makers.
They’re comfortable prioritizing digital-first, collaborative experiences. That is the force shaping how purchasing journeys unfold.
The complex consensus buying processes with many remote participants?
That’s the standard operating model today for high-consideration purchases—they’re not going away.
The unfortunate reality is that despite all the data proving these tectonic shifts, too many sales and marketing organizations still need to catch up with evolving strategies, skill sets, technologies, and mindsets to cope.
Old ways of:
- segmenting audiences,
- crafting uni-dimensional messaging,
- building human-powered processes,
- defining seller competencies, remain persistent in too many B2B go-to-market engines, and
are putting those companies at increasing risk of becoming irrelevant.
So:
While maintaining inertia is always the path of least resistance, it’s also the surest path to becoming a ghost.
For anyone still dragging their feet on executing the resets needed to match the new buying environment, that window is closing.
It’s evolve or “see you later, alligator.”
Transform, transform, transform—until engaging buyers becomes your lifeblood.
Or become a relic.
It’s your call.
The Analytical Wordsmith 