Putting the buyer at the heart of businesses’ go-to-market strategies entails understanding the buyer’s needs, behaviours, and aspirations. Collecting and acting on buyer insights cannot stop at the go-to-market strategy; it has to be baked across the whole revenue engine, from marketing to sales and customer success. Forrester’s 2021 B2B Buying Study revealed enormous shifts in buyer behaviour. Marketers need to understand how their buyers are changing and enable their buyer-facing roles with key insights to gain competitive advantage and drive growth. Here are some key elements that you will need to understand in order to plan a winning strategy.

B2B Buyers’ Behaviours

One typical change example that our research shows is that IT buyers are once again taking center stage, with a dramatic increase of IT buyers involved as decision-maker in large strategic deals that span multiple departments (50% in 2015 to 74% in 2021). Now, more than ever, B2B marketers need to pay extra attention to these changes in IT buyer persona behaviours to rethink their strategy, improve engagement, and enable winning sales conversations. Many more changes have arisen, and you need to monitor and constantly adapt if you want to stay ahead.

Personas

That said, you need to have previously identified your personas well to build a winning strategy. Packaging buyer insights into targeted buyer personas is a crucial delivery mechanism for enablement, yet our research shows that this asset often goes underused across most B2B marketing organisations. Although high-performing organisations are more likely to provide personas to internal sales teams (48%, compared to 33% of low-performing organisations), it is clear that companies often struggle to create personas in a way that is compelling for internal audiences. Ignoring this vital asset is not only a waste of marketers’ time and resources, but it is also an immense missed opportunity in the market. You need to learn how to construct and deploy compelling buyer personas, and you can do this using Forrester’s B2B Buyer Persona Framework.

Buying Group

In large B2B deals, personas rarely act alone, so marketers need to understand multiple, individual personas, as well as how they interact as a group with their colleagues when making buying decisions. Associating personas with roles such as decision-maker, champion, or influencer can help the whole revenue engine align and decide where to focus their efforts.

Join Me On 23 June

All of the above is crucial, and mastering it is a complex and ever-changing proposition. Join me during a free live webinar on 23 June to learn how to adapt to your buyers’ changing behaviours and ensure that you receive the necessary guidance to create personas that add strategic value for your organisation.

Register here.