Why Are Buyer Insights So Vital for Product, Marketing and Sales Leaders?

Shifting to an audience-centric go-to-market strategy remains at the top of most B2B leaders’ priority lists. Why? Because product, marketing and sales leaders recognize that the product-centric way of marketing and selling B2B offerings simply doesn’t resonate with buyers. Evolving to an audience-centric approach leads to increased engagement through improved response rates and more meaningful interactions with buyers. What most organizations still struggle with is how to better understand buyer behaviors and preferences. Much of the persona work we see from clients does a good job of capturing a buyer’s challenges, initiatives and pain points, but the detail falls off quickly when it comes to understanding the buyer’s journey. Understanding how your buyers gather information and how they want to interact with you throughout is the missing link to making personas actionable for the rest of the organization.

Buyer Insights Reports

To help clients gain insights into buying behavior, SiriusDecisions conducts a B2B Buying Study every two years. The study involves surveying B2B buyers to examine their recent buying behavior across every stage of the decision-making process and within different buying scenarios (e.g. an independent buying scenario vs. a committee-based buying scenario). With these insights in hand, organizations can better understand buying behaviors (e.g. content and interaction preferences) and key decision drivers.

SiriusDecisions has used the results of the study to develop a series of Buyer Insights Reports that provide high-level information about buyers’ preferences. There are 33 total reports, focused on specific buyer personas (e.g. CEO, CIO, enterprise architect, HR, finance) or buyers within specific functional areas or industries (e.g. government, IT, retail).

These reports include data and analysis, and the implications that B2B organizations need to consider. Details include the preferred balance of human and non-human interactions, content asset preferences, the level of buyer engagement during each stage of the buying process, and the interactions that have the most impact on the buying decision. Here’s an example of a key statistic gleaned from analysis of all the respondents in the survey: B2B buyers average 17 meaningful interactions when completing a purchase.

Why Product, Sales and Marketing Leaders Need Buyer Insights

Buyer insights reveal the truth about what buyers want. B2B organizations should align product, sales and marketing leadership around these critical insights, as they are required to effectively execute go-to-market strategies. Importantly, the Buyer Insights Reports reflect the buyer’s perspective – this allows B2B teams to build an accurate and informed buyer’s journey map that includes the buyer’s preferred content, activities and interactions. Buyer insights provide clarity (and consistency) across product, sales and marketing teams to deeply understand the buying audience, which gives their organization a better chance of standing out from the competition, hitting goals and driving revenue with their target audience.

• For product leaders. Buyer insights provide a better understanding of key decision drivers – and how buyers behave and what they care about. Being more informed can support ideation and development efforts, thus leading to products that stand out in a competitive market and are well positioned to meet growth goals.
• For sales leaders. Buyer insights provide the ability to educate sales teams on prospective buyers and their behaviors. With this deep knowledge, sales teams can focus on the touchpoints during the buying cycle that are most critical. They can also have more meaningful conversations and interactions, leading to better engagement with the buyer and greater sales productivity.
• For marketing leaders. There is nothing more powerful than truly understanding what buyers want and how they behave. Armed with buyer insights, B2B marketers can build strong personas, develop messaging that resonates with buyers at each stage of the buyer’s journey, build marketing campaigns and programs that appeal to buyers, and allocate resources to work on optimal content for the target buyer.

If you are a SiriusDecisions client, contact your account team to learn how to access the Buyer Insights Reports.