Such a catchy title – “B2B Buying Disconnect Report”
Here’re some interesting tidbits from TrustRadius / Pavilion’s 2024 report,
– Buyers are relying on fewer resources than before
Action: Quality trumps quantity. No one’s reading vendors’ 48 page buying guides to take purchase decisions.
-“Own prior experience”
Action: Know, connect & nurture key stakeholders in your clients and stay in touch as they move from one org to another. I wonder if “own prior experience” implicitly includes experience of trusted peers. If so, dark social is being validated once again.
-Experiencing the Product
Action: Demos, prior experience & trials – three of the five most consulted resources are to do with the buyers’ experience of your product. How much attention is being given to make that experience as friction-less as possible? Will we see a massive move to self-serve product demos? Will we see more thought being put into onboarding and in-app tutorials?
– Review Websites
5% drop in consulting user reviews: guess people know how certain review websites are pay to play and some others are being gamed by vendors.
– Free Trials
10% drop in free trials: how do we consolidate this with consulting the vendor website staying at 47%? Is this due to the rise of other ways to give our samples of the product such as interactive demos, recorded demos etc.?
There’s plenty more in the report – definitely an interesting read particularly the bit about how buyers take decisions versus how vendors think they take decisions 🙂 hint, the number 1 reason why buyers select a product is best fit + best price. All the other reasons are to do with risk mitigation (vendor brand, existing relationships, past experience, existing customers etc.).
Credit for the below graph goes to TrustRadius & Pavilion.