By Kevin Newcomb, Editor, Internet Marketing Institute
Business-to-business buying behavior is an enigma to many, even those who spend their lives trying to sell their products to businesses. For the average B2B marketer, understanding what makes buyers tick can mean the difference between success and failure of their business, or at the very least of their own careers.
Last month, at the B2B Search Strategy Summit  in San Francisco, B2B marketers learned a new way of looking at B2B buying behavior. In the morning keynote address, Gord Hotchkiss, president and CEO of Enquiro, shared some findings from a comprehensive business-to-business marketing research initiative known as the BuyerSphere Project.
The research grew out of Enquiro’s own curiosity, as a market research and online marketing services firm that sells to other businesses, according to Hotchkiss. Like many B2B companies, Enquiro recognized that the buying process rarely went as planned, and so decided to find out why.
Enquiro — along with thought leaders from Google, Business.com, Marketo, Covario and DemandBase — proceeded to perform more than 100 face-to-face interviews with business buyers, hundreds of eye-tracking research sessions, and a survey of more than 3,000 business buyers. The results were published last fall in a 210-page report, The BuyerSphere Project: How Business Buys from Business.
The BuyerSphere Project debunks several commonly held beliefs about B2B marketing, including the idea that B2B buying is rational and emotionless, that it’s an organized and clearly thought-out process, or that the availability of information delivered online has made business buying easier.
Nothing could be further from the truth, according to Hotchkiss, who writes:Â
“So this is what we have: a hunch that human decision making is more convoluted and irrational than we ever guessed, a realization that those same mechanisms are used at work just as they are at home, a limited understanding of how decisions are made when you have multiple people working within an organizational framework, and, to add an exponential dimension of complexity to everything, the explosion of information and communication opportunities presented by the internet. Our paradigm is shifting before we ever defined it. No wonder we can’t catch up.”
After digging into the buying behaviors of thousands of businesses, the Enquiro researchers were able to distill some key findings in several areas, including:Â
1. The Risk Gap
The Risk Gap refers to the way the typical “Risk and Reward” process falls apart for B2B buying. The idea that our decisions are based on avoiding risk or attaining a reward is not really applicable to a B2B buying scenario, where the “reward” emotions are far outweighed by the “risk” emotions. That’s because the person making the buying decision doesn’t usually stand to personally benefit from a B2B purchase, but the penalties that might come from making a bad decision are ever-present in the buyer’s mind.
 Add to that the concepts of personal risk vs. organizational risk, or the varying degree of risk in repeat purchases vs. “blank slate” purchases, and the Risk Gap takes on even more importance. The old maxim, “99% of business buying is about covering your butt,” holds true today, which means that B2B marketers need to figure out how to use the tools they have to minimize the risk and provide buyers with a reason to trust them.
2. The Myth of the Funnel
The marketing concept of a “buying funnel” — where a buyer progresses neatly from Need to Awareness to Consideration to Purchase to Use — is a myth, according to Enquiro’s research. Buyers do pass through those areas on the way to a purchase, but it’s rarely done in a logical, rational, and linear way, according to Hotchkiss.
In the pre-Web model, geographic and resource limitations would force a business to take a disciplined approach to identifying and developing a market before it even thought of marketing and selling to that market. Face-to-face, feet-on-the-street selling was the only way.
The Internet appeared to offer a shortcut, where prospective buyers would find the business online, instead of the business having to go out and find the buyers. While this drastically broadened the number of prospects at the top of the traditional sales funnel, too often those prospects never made it to the final sale. Without the face-to-face reassurances, many potential buyers bailed out when their concerns about risk were not adequately addressed.
The BuyerSphere Project reveals the need for a new model, one that puts people back in the center of the process and combines the strengths of online and offline channels. Online and offline both need to be integrated into the process of identifying and developing a market, marketing and selling to that market, and servicing that market.
3. The Buyer-Doer Gap
 Anyone who has ever bought or sold a product for business knows that most of the time, the person who is going to use the product is not the same one that does the buying. And yet, B2B marketers often fail to address the needs of both the “doers,” who will be using the product, and the “buyers,” who hold the purse strings.
Enquiro’s research unveils a gap between buyers and doers in relation to risk assessment. It boils down to the fact that doers are looking to evaluate the product, while buyers will evaluate the vendor. For the doer, the risks revolve around whether or not the product will make the user’s life easier. For buyers, the concerns involve whether they can trust the vendor, if the vendor will be easy to work with, or if the vendor is financially secure.
A B2B marketer needs to address risk concerns from both parties, in various stages of the buying cycle. Generally, the doer will be evaluating the product early on, to see if it does what they need. Once you can convince them it will, then it’s time to convince the buyer that it’s safe to do business with you.Â
These are just a few of the findings of the BuyerSphere research that Hotchkiss discussed at the B2B Search Strategy Summit last month. If you missed the B2B Search Summit, check out the upcoming PPC Summit Presents…Search Marketing and Social Media Success coming to Los Angeles in September — learn more about this comprehensive training event at www.PPCSummit.com.
