How to Simplify the B2B Buying Journey

What is the B2B Buying Journey?

The B2B buying journey is the complete process that your buyer will go through, starting from the discovery of your brand, to the evaluation of your products and services, and finally to the decision of purchasing.

B2B buying is hard.

Unlike the B2C market where potential buyers are individuals, a complex B2B buying process likely goes through 6-10 decision-makers, each with their own set of qualifications, processes, and timelines.

The B2B buying journey includes research, evaluation and stakeholder engagement, then repeat through those processes and so much more before making any final decisions.

A great B2B buyer’s journey and understanding your buyers’ behavior will greatly improve your chances of upselling and retaining your customers later down the road.

In order to win in this competitive environment, you need to stand out from the competition.

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1. Arm your champion with the right information

Whether identifying various pain points or considering new products and services, there will be plenty of collateral, documents, emails, and more. Unfortunately, in such a complex sales process, key data points can easily get lost in translation between multiple members of the sales team and the customer.

You had your discovery call with your prospect, and your prospect just became your champion.

"Your sales reps have roughly 5% of a customer’s time during their B2B buying journey." - Gartner

Your champion outlined everything they need for their success criteria. With so many stakeholders, it’s important to be armed with the right information. Your champion has to field objections and blockers on your behalf.

Make their lives easier by consolidating resources, information, and specifics all in one place. Provide all the collateral they’ll need, so they can feel prepared and confident when selling your product for you to their stakeholders.

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2. Get everyone on the same page

Your champion crushed it. Now more stakeholders are involved.

Historically, everything is communicated through various channels: emails, video chats, Slack, text messages, and more. This leads to possible confusion and assumptions. It gets messy and unclear what happens next.

Visually, this is probably what your deals look like…

Taking a step back, this is pretty chaotic... especially if you're working on many complex deals.

What would it mean for your buyer's experience if you were able to invite yourself, your team, AND all of your external stakeholders onto one page?

‍Provide a way for you to consolidate and present your resources, action plans, and communication with your buyers, where they don’t have to dig through their inboxes, pinned notes, and more.

3. Guide them through the entire journey

In the maze that is B2B buying, you need to lead the way as a guide. You’ve managed countless complex sales cycles, they haven’t. As the de facto expert, your goal is to be a trusted advisor.

How do you do that? With Mutual Action Plans.

This might be the first time your buyer has purchased a product like yours. Guide them through the process by creating a collaborative plan that maps out your sales process to your buyer’s buying process.

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4. Set clear next steps and milestones

As said by one of our partners' Winning by Design, "A 'critical event' is an event that is so important that it drives a prospect to make a decision. Otherwise, they will experience negative consequences."

Work backwards from your go-live date or a critical event to clearly outline every step. Don’t just map out the next few steps, instead walk buyers through the entire buyer journey. Take them from your first call through onboarding and implementation.

Our data shows that buyers are 65% more likely to complete a task when their name is assigned to it with a deadline.

Set expectations by collaborating together and creating a checklist of next steps that need to be done by both parties, with clear owners and specific due dates. This ensures a seamless journey, with no surprises.

5. Multithread your stakeholders

Sales multithreading is building relationships with multiple decision-makers on your buyer’s side.

Again, there are many stakeholders within one complex deal and many moving parts. Why wait for one stakeholder to complete their next step

Time kills all deals. Don’t get stopped at checkpoints.

Multithread your complex deals by identifying key stakeholders at the beginning of the sales process, and work in parallel across internal AND external departments.

This will speed up your sales cycle, close more deals, and understand prospects deeper to identify potential problems in the buying process.

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To Recap

The B2B Buying Journey is complex and can have 6-10 decision-makers with their own timelines. To simplify the B2B Buying Journey, you want to arm your champion to sell internally for you, get everyone on the same page with mutually agreed upon next steps and timelines, and work in parallel to keep the momentum going.

Recapped is the easiest way to consolidate all sales and marketing materials needed for your champion and decision-makers while being able to guide them through their entire journey, and provide visibility to next steps and guidelines, and more.

If you present a simple B2B Buying Journey for your buyers, they’ll be able to focus on what actually matters.

‍Request a demo to see how Recapped can help you easily reduce friction in your B2B buyer journey and help you stand out from the competition.