From Friction to Freedom: Redefining the B2B Buying Experience in 2024

Summary:

• Modern buyers prefer flexible, on-demand consumption similar to platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Netflix, rejecting rigid and linear sales experiences.
• Shorter attention spans necessitate quick and easy access to information, making an immediate and personalized buyer experience crucial.
• Many B2B buyers find current vendor experiences lacking, with over 36% citing poor buying experiences as deal breakers, highlighting the importance of a seamless and flexible process.
• Businesses that prioritize a buyer-centric, flexible experience from the first interaction are seeing higher win rates, better customer retention, and lower acquisition costs, creating a significant competitive edge in the B2B market.

It’s 2024 – What do we want as modern buyers?

In our personal lives, we prefer on-demand consumption – what we want, when we want it.

We choose to watch and listen to videos more than we choose to read.

We want the fastest, quickest, and easiest way to find the information important to us – which is almost always a unique, non-linear experience that we choose for ourselves. And oftentimes, when confronted with a rigid, scripted path, we reject it and move on to something else.

Part of that has to do with the fact that attention spans are shorter. Short attention spans need immediate results.

As consumers, we watch YouTube, TikTok, and Netflix. We listen to Spotify. We shop on Amazon.

We have moved away from Broadcast TV, Broadcast Radio, Print Media, Catalog shopping, and the like.

Why? Because they control what is available to watch, read, and listen to. And they control when it's available. They create very rigid, linear experience that doesn't give us the ability to choose.

In contrast, YouTube, TikTok, Netflix, Spotify, Amazon are the platforms of choice because they allow for an on-demand, flexible experience for each buyer.

Make no mistake about it – those platforms do influence us as consumers. They decide what appears to us on page 1. They collect our behavior data, and use that data to increase the likelihood that we’ll buy from them. They do not, however, stop us from choosing our own path and digging deeper. In fact, they encourage it, because it allows them to learn more about each of us and our changing needs/desires. The main point is that they make us feel in control of the process.

With this reality in mind, think back to the current state of B2B. Do we as buyers get that experience as we evaluate vendors? Does your business offer that flexible experience to your buyers? The majority of us would say no. And unfortunately, this severely stunts the growth of our businesses.

In a recent study of 200+ B2B decision makers, over 36% cited that the main deal breaker in recent buying processes was the poor experience offered by a vendor.

Similarly, the state of the connected consumer report from salesforce found that 84% of buyers noted that the buying experience was often just as, if not more, important than the product itself.

These statistics highlight the reality that today, B2B buyers have multiple vendors to buy from, making the buying experience an incredibly impactful factor in their decision to buy. If you offer a rigid, friction-filled buying experience (gated demos, requiring early interactions with sales, inability to answer questions quickly, etc.), more than a third of your buyers may be abandoning the process – even if your product is superior to a competitor’s.

And this leads to the question: why haven’t many business leaders updated the buying experience they offer to be less rigid? A common answer is that many still prioritize a rigid buying experience because they're easy to measure internally – how many leads, what stage of the sales process they’re in, etc. – and they do so at the expense of making it easier for the buyer to buy.

In today’s buyer-led B2B market, the businesses offering flexible, buyer-centric buying experience from a buyer’s very first interaction are thriving – evident by early results such as higher win rates, higher customer retention, and lower customer acquisition costs.

The most exciting part is, because many vendors are still trying to squeeze more juice out of their rigid, linear process, there is a massive opportunity for businesses that take a buyer-centric approach to jump ahead of competitors (and distance themselves from competitors with the data they’re start collecting – that’s a post for another day). Not only will buyer-centric vendors accelerate their growth, they will wow their buyers with a refreshing, B2C-like experience – one that matches what their buyers are already accustomed to in their personal lives.

All in all, buyers are simply not engaging with vendors the way they did in 2010. It’s up to individual businesses to provide a better way to let the buyer buy – or risk losing them to a competitor with a more modern buying process.

Thank you for reading!

Omedym is leading the B2B sales revolution with buyer-centric interactive demos and digital sales rooms, making it easier for buyers to buy while empowering modern sales teams with buyer insights.

Learn more at Omedym.com.