According to Gartner, average B2B tech sales cycles are approaching a year and a half, with 4/5 buyers expressing purchase regret.
"For most enterprise business professionals, the experience of purchasing and adopting technology is quite poor."
Gartner analyst Garret Astler provides insight into the root cause of this dissatisfaction:
"Even the most differentiated products with highly targeted messaging fail when prospects are unable to navigate their buying jobs to be done. As long as buying teams struggle to identify their business problems, perform solution exploration, build requirements and generate consensus along the way, we will continue to see long sales cycles frequently leading to regret." (B2B Tech Buying Teams Are Struggling: Here’s How to Guide Them)
Help buyers do their jobs with buyer enablement content
Buyer enablement is the information and tools provided to buyers to help them complete critical buys tasks faster and more easily. Buying jobs often include:
Buying Job | Key Considerations |
Problem Identification | “We need to do something about this.” |
Solution Exploration | “What’s out there to solve our problem?” |
Requirements Building | “What exactly do we need the solution to do?” |
Vendor Selection | “Does this vendor create the value we need them to?” |
Buyers don't always tackle these problems in order, and as individuals struggle to complete jobs quickly and seamlessly, entire teams struggle to gain consensus around the key considerations.
How analyst content can help buyer enablement
In What Accelerates Sales Cycles, Gartner analysts compare the behaviors of faster buyers (total cycle time <12 months) to slower buyers (total cycle time >12 months).
One of the behaviors uncovered was that a higher percentage of faster buyers engaged with analyst content:
Additionally, Gartner analysts noted that "Faster Buyers are more likely to use analyst content earlier in the buying journey than Slower Buyers"
Provide objective insight and data for internal scrutiny and business case
Gartner analysts continually hear of increased scrutiny being applied throughout the buying process, especially by customers' finance teams. (Quick Answer: What Actions Can Help Accelerate Purchase Decisions Facing Increased Financial Scrutiny?)
In this environment, supplying analyst content to prospective buyers empowers them with objective insight and data they can use to build their internal business case.
White papers, eBooks and other buyer enablement materials produced by technology vendors themselves may be viewed with more skepticism than an independent report authored by Gartner analysts.
Provide the education tech buying teams are seeking
Gartner analysts have found that buying teams can now average from 14 to 23 people, depending on the size of the spend.
In addition, members of these large and diverse teams "spend only 16% of their buying time meeting with all potential suppliers, and they continually refer to digital channels even while in contact with a sales rep. They spend the other time conducting research independently, using a mix of supplier and independent resources, or meeting internally without suppliers present." (Focus on Buying Jobs Rather Than the Chaos of Buying Journeys)
By providing an analyst report on a topic of high relevance to their business problem, buying journey, or technology category, you will be delivering valuable content that can help the buying team build consensus and gain a deeper understanding of the value of your technology.